when will you be here again? is Sydney artist Grasps’ sophomore album. It is an almost-36 minutes of reverb, muted piano, luscious strings, and vocals that feel like a breeze against a harsh soundscape.
‘7 Hells’ is the preface to the album. Featuring the vocal talents of BAYANG (tha Bushranger), the track is explosive, expansive and gruesome – feeling much like a genesis, or the opposite: a utopia on the cusp of falling. Echoing the lyrics, “Fall on the blade like crop,” this is the beginning of an epic.
‘The Bridge’ ascends from the ashes of the opener and introduces a secondary sound to the album, characterised by Grasps’ auto-tuned vocals and crashing percussion. Moments of reprieve are offered through yearning strings, building momentum as promised into what feels like the true opening of the album.
A sobering recording of Blackheath opens ‘Sniper Rifle’, a track that primarily indulges in wavering pulses, elongated synths and shattering glass. Grasps dips further into the ambient, unfiltered and raw in ‘As I Draw My Final Breath’ – hearing the rush of wind on a field recorder feels more ghostly than ever. The album features two more artists, Marcus Whale and Wa?ste on tracks ‘Ex Nihilo’ and ‘Extend1’, respectively. ‘Ex Nihilo’ is beautiful; credit to the harmonies that bleed and bleed and continue to bleed like a hymn in a mourning falsetto.
The latter half of the album sits in a recurring sound of dulled harmonics, felted piano, explosions, eruptions, static played forwards, backwards, inverted and forwards again. Grasps’ exploration of sound manipulation falls seamlessly together in a fated sigh of relief; nothing feels out of place.
when will you be here again? is the score of a dystopia, though it feels hard to explain why. Somewhere between the sincere fear and uncertainty of death and the sonic qualities of metallic tones and organic rustles, drips and chirps, peeks something else: a sense of sublimity, or accepted inevitability and responsibility – renewing the meaning of falling on one’s sword.
Words by Rhea Thomas