20 years of making music together sounds different. Final Day Society is a collective of 4 members from different parts of Sweden. There is perhaps an understanding of melody here like nowhere else in the world. The same town heralds the most brutal death metal band and the most atmospheric, transformative electronic music as well. The band come together again for their fifth album, called YOU CAN.
Opening with the rich but melancholy Feel Something, they layer a soft percussive background with guitar notes that stand out as bright stars in a blotting dark sky. Vocals fade away behind the melodies, while they shimmer with a certain flair. Vocals aren’t packed like layers of prose; rather, they’re more like questions of wonder. They recede with purpose, as the guitar moves forward again. This post-rock, shoegaze blend has quite the impact on your psyche, receding to become an incredibly poignant piece.
Each song plays out like an epic, the way it’s supposed to, trailing through several emotions. If one song has a consciousness of thought, one has aggression and rage. You Are opens as the next single, layered with a monotone giving an unnerving disturbance in the tempo. It breaks the illusion of the previous track quite instantly, while layered guitars contribute a wall of sound. Suddenly at the 2-minute mark the echoes go away, shifting to a spatial, atmospheric experience. It’s amazing how they let the instrumentals speak volumes, combining different kinds of melodies into one generous slice. The kind of music that warps time.
Not Even Time was a personal favourite for the kind of composition it proved to become. The glowing strum pattern comes along with the harmonica to create an alt-folk effect that melds with the shoegaze experience. Percussions can make you feel like you’re going on a long drive to nowhere, the path leading you to different windows of time. Songs like Signals reverberate with a positive energy you’d have to recede into to truly understand. I like how every production detail has looked at the depth of the aural experience and tinkered with the sound to give an output that matches the theme so perfectly.
To trace their journey, I listened to the acclaimed Noise Passes, Silence Remains in its entirety. It is special how a band has been able to develop their sound to absorb the benefits of this future, where sound can be so detailed. However, they haven’t lost their unique fingerprint, only built on it. Each member, be it Suwat, Marcus, Pierre, Victor or Andreas, has brought learnings from their other projects to experiment and be involved in this. Rather than an experiment, this is a lasting fragment of time, for they almost change the frequency of how time is experienced with their music.
Unique percussive patterns open some songs, like It’ll Be Ok. You become honed into this like it would be a heartbeat, enriched with experiential synths and leading guitar parts. I loved how while having a singular thread of healing, each song had its own fingerprint. Hold our hand, as you experience this album.
