It's funny how music echoes in more ways than one. Beyond the physical, aural phenomena, there is something of the echo in how music influences itself, how artists, genres, and styles emerge from each other. It might just be an artifact of being an avid, long time listener but even if so, who cares? It's all in the ear of the listener, is it not? In any case, I find myself understanding influences, progressions, and lineages after the fact, like an echo emerging from a sound that it itself created. Here's an example: Junius. The influence of Junius on post-metal cannot be overstated. Both The Martyrdom of a Catastrophist (2009) and Reports from the Threshold of Death (2011) were progenitors of the genre and high water marks for its quality. What drew people (or, at least, me) to these albums was a lot of things to be sure but much of it were the unique, darkwave (think Depeche Mode) inflected vocals of Joseph E. Martinez.
Then, supposedly separately, I started noticing a shift in post-rock and metal over the last few years. I've written about it on the blog - gone were the scintillatingly hazy vocals that sometimes appeared on post-rock (which was, and still is, mostly instrumental) and present now were somber, dark, melancholic vocals. Oh Hiroshima and Towers of Jupiter are probably my go to examples but there are more. I was sort of surprised by this shift and didn't have a lot of influences to put it into context. Until Junius came back and released Sotera and I was suddenly reminded of where I knew this all from.
You can't really blame me, right? The band's last release was in 2017. But suddenly, I remembered that it was Junius, at the very start of the "third" wave of post-rock, which introduced that kind of murky, alternative, melancholic sound to the genre via the vocals. And once I remembered it, I could not stop listening to Sotera. Both the bands I cited above and the others who have been making music in this style are great but Junius are Junius and Sotera is one of the best albums I've heard in this style, including when compared to their previous release. I absolutely adore how deep Martinez goes here, both with his vocals and with the rest of the instrumentation.
Check out "Scythian" for example, probably my favorite track from that album. The main riff is so bottomless, so potent with energy. Especially when backed up by those deep, deep kick drums, cold as hell synth lines and, above it all, Martinez's voice resplendent in a harsh light. And those are the clean vocals! The harsh screams work beautifully as well, married to the noisier, more explosive parts of the track. All of this conjures a goth grandeur, a theatrical conjuring of affect and emotion.
"Scythian" closes off the album with these majestically dark sounds but the rest of the work has plenty of them as well. But it's a standout in the execution of the style and a phenomenal reminder that Junius are not only masters of it but one of the original voices within it. Sotera is a magisterial comeback album and a very interesting past/present/future step in the resurgence of a darker, more gothic style of post rock and metal.