[Cover art by David Preissel]
The sounds of Neurosis’ “Locust Star” emanate from a desktop speaker wired to an iPod Nano via ⅛-inch cable
“Hey maaaan … is that Ponderous Post Metal?”
“Yeah maaan …”
“Well turn it up MAAAN!!”
Isis’ “So Did We” plays
Cult of Luna’s “Further” Plays
Callisto’s “Blackhole” Plays
“Turn it down man! Hey man! Remember the good old days? Flip phones? The Iraq War?
“Cryptically posting song lyrics on your Facebook Wall…??”
“Well, we found this album by a band called Loneshore called Nothing Left to Deconstruct. It’s got all those sounds we used to groove to back then!”
Post-metal’s frothy wave peaked somewhere around 2005, a time now as remote to us as the heyday of classic rock was to the target demo of Freedom Rock, a best-of compilation featuring tracks by Three Dog Night, The O’Jays the Allman Brothers (+ many more!), and marketed extensively via late-night TV ads starting in 1987
Just like the protagonists of the Freedom Rock infomercial, those of us who enjoyed post-metal’s prime are now pretty far from our own; what Brazil’s Loneshore propose on Nothing Left to Deconstruct is that the sounds of post-metal are not.
Release date: June 19, 2026. Label: Willowtip Records.
We begin with a pair of tracks (“Self Oscillations” and “Straylight”) that function as through-composed companion pieces, and if you’ve listened to enough of this type of album, you’ll predict how the proceedings will unfold. A melodic clean channel guitar line iterates, portentous vocals and tribal drums color in the frame, and tension builds until it breaks under the weight of a de-tuned power-chord pummeling.
The highlight here comes at around 6:25 of “Straylight,” as the main melodic theme established at the end of “Self Oscillations” as a plucked arpeggio returns in the form of a bravura lead line. Attentive listeners get a full-spectrum pay-off here after a solid 10-minutes of build-up, especially as the vocals switch from clean to dirty and the rhythm guitars add a dash of counterpoint at the precise moment your brain is itching to remember precisely where you’ve heard the starring melody before.
So, the first 12 minutes of Nothing Left To Deconstruct are post-metal done well, but as we’ve heard it done before. As we move through the heart of the album, Loneshore go a little deeper.
Take “To Stride the Black Earth.” Off-top, the bruising main-riff in 6/8 meter feels like a competent and loving nod to post-metal’s past, specifically prime Neurosis. But at around 2:35 something genuinely surprising happens–rather than ratcheting up the intensity, Loneshore ups the complexity. A modal lead guitar line dances around the odd-metal guitar riff while percussionist Pedro Mercier embellishes his drum pattern with some playful high-hat pat-a-cake. This is the kind of stuff entire progressive djent albums are made of, but Loneshore indulges it only briefly–it’s a seasoning, not a full meal.
For this particular set of ears, Loneshore reveals what they’ve really got going on as a unit on “Birth of a Mountain.” While the subscribers to r/progmetal may disagree, I’ve never really made sense of the significant overlap between Tool’s and Opeth’s fanbases, but Loneshore kind of makes sense of it for me here. Starting with a tricky riff over another odd-meter drum beat, the early feel of this track is something like “what if Adam Jones strived to keep up with Danny Carey.” But then another truly bracing set of counterfactuals hits us at around the 2:00 minute mark; What if that guitar player was Mikael Åkerfeldt? And what if he was still composing the kind of guitar lines he did on Still Life, Blackwater Park and Deliverance?
“Birth of a Mountain” is simply a good-stuff machine, particularly for fans of a subtler form of prog that reveals its complexity with deeper, more attentive listeners. When the main riff returns for the final minutes of “Birth of a Mountain,” it comes back not only heavier, but it eventually opens up to gorgeous pedal-tone riff that doesn’t recall Opeth or Tool or anyone else really–it’s just the sound of Loneshore coming into their own on a very good song amid a very good album.
Incidentally, one of my favorite moments of the entire album comes during the coda of “Birth of a Mountain,” a clean channel guitar piece that wouldn’t sound out of place as an interlude on Blackwater Park. It’s a pleasant comedown from the big, bad crescendo that comes before, but that’s not why I love it. What tickles my ear so is that if you listen closely, you’ll notice some bricked notes in the strummed chords. It’s an imperfection! A fingerprint left on a recording made by top-level human musicians. Who doesn’t want more of that in their life?
The magic trick of “Birth of a Mountain” is that it sort of teaches you how to listen to the rest of the album. Once you really grok that this is post-metal performed by players with prog chops, you can’t help start trying to count every measure, to trace the lineage of this or that slip-sliding riff, or to simply rest in valley of breather track “Lost Waters” and feel the exhilaration of finding another peak once the main melodic theme of “Parhelion” hits.
Corollary? You’ve got to give this one a little time to work its magic on you, and there may be at least one superficial bit that frustrates your efforts. Through repeated listens, I’ve come to really enjoy the vocal performance of vocalist Luiz Felipe Netto, but my initial impression was, in short, “is this the fuckin’ guy from Chevelle.” It’s … not. And while Netto’s range and diversity eventually do prove themselves a service to Nothing Left to Deconstruct … he never really stops kinda sounding like the fuckin’ guy from Chevelle.
But let’s not dwell on that. Let’s talk about Freedom Rock. It’s worth pointing out that the rock music featured on that comp was a dead letter in 1987. The commercial was just as much of a joke to the viewers who saw it air live as it is to those of us who semi-regularly pull it up on Youtube for yucks now. But post-metal genres didn’t really go away like that. Maybe it’s because it never burned bright enough to ever merit the attendant burn out, but I’d like to think its post-peak flourishing has a little more to do with the existence of acts like Loneshore. Nothing Left to Deconstruct waters the genre’s roots while planting a few fresh ideas. It’s not an act of post-metal revival, just a respectable bit of work to ensure it stays alive.
The post Loneshore – Nothing Left To Deconstruct Review appeared first on Last Rites.
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