“No Tether” is the new album from Australian quartet Tangled Thoughts of Leaving. Having toured the world, earning a cult following for their sonic explorations of doom-jazz, post-metal and piano-drive prog on earlier releases Deaden The Field, Failed by Man and Machine and Yield To Despair, the band have taken 3 years to produce their latest record. Sharing stages with contemporaries such as Russian Circles, The Ocean, MONO, sleepmakeswaves, Boris & This Will Destroy You has informed their experimentations, but they have pushed into a realm all their own.

Watch the video to the first single The Alarmist HERE

The sonic concepts for No Tether emerged in the wake of performing Yield To Despair (2015) live. There were some tonal mine shafts in the vein of Yield that, after playing the record live repeatedly, the band felt there were greater depths to explore – longer doom passages and darker, feedback-driven tones. But the overriding feeling in the band was that there was a tangent to be taken, with faster, more free-form compositions. The addition of Paul Briggs on guitar also drove this transition.

One of the central concepts to the sound of No Tether, is to never trust the riff, to never let it settle – as soon as the riff and the beat forms, Tangled are willing to de-construct it, change its form and fold it back on itself. This is evident through the post-metal beat-down of The Alarmist, the drone of Cavern Ritual and the wild prog of Binary Collapse – as soon as the central riffs and beats are presented they are subtly morphed on each subsequent re-presentation.

This concept was initially explored in a series of huge recorded jams at Studio Sleepwalker’s Dread in early 2016. Hours of material was recorded, with the band focussing on pushing as hard against the grain of Yield as possible – fast riffs and grinding beats throwing as many vicious shapes out as possible. At one stage, the record that was emerging was going to be one continuous song cycle snaking through various noise-scapes – but eventually the different textures and movements separated from one another and the seven songs that make up No Tether emerged.

The recording process for No Tether was approached as a cycle of continuous writing, recording, review and re- recording. Some songs were recorded at multiple times in the year from January 2017 to January 2018, informed by new information emerging elsewhere in the record. Some songs were recorded live with minimal overdubs – the improvised interplay of drums and piano on Inner Dissonance and the wild drum and distorted bass grids of No Tether are the best evidence of this – with other pieces meticulously pieced together in long recording sessions.

No Tether is also a record of its environment. The soundscape presented by the record – the sounds of frogs, trains, birds flying past microphones – are all drawn from the environment directly outside Studio Sleepwalker’s Dread in North Dandalup, Western Australia, where the album was written and recorded.

The artwork for No Tether was once again produced in collaboration with Sydney artist Teo Treloar. During the writing and recording of No Tether, various pieces from Treloar’s series, Another Grey World, were placed around the studio, setting a visual tone for the record. The cover image and Treloar’s repeated study of Dürer’s Melencolia polyhedron in various drawings reflected the approach the band was taking with No Tether; in the mechanical sense with angular riffs being constantly morphed and represented in different forms, and in the emotional sense, reaching out to capture an unobtainable and somewhat unexplainable feeling.

Track list:
1. Sublunar
2. The Alarmist
3. Cavern Ritual
4. Signal Erosion
5. Inner Dissonance
6. Binary Collapse
7. No Tether

“No Tether” will be officially released on July 27th through the labels Dunk! Records (EU) and Bird’s Robe (worldwide)

For more information:
https://tangledthoughtsofleaving.com
https://www.facebook.com/TangledThoughtsOfLeaving
https://music.tangledthoughtsofleaving.com

https://www.birdsrobe.com

https://dunkrecords.com