Moving too fast for the past

When I first encountered Weave some eighteen months or so ago, they were a group of intense young men making intensely beautiful shoegaze noise.

They were also rapidly developing a serious following.

Fast-forward to today and their new Thirst to Joy EP lands in my lap, pressed onto a deliciously luxurious slab of ten-inch white vinyl.

And the transformation is startling.

The towering guitars and dreamlike atmospheres are still present, but something darker and altogether more confrontational has crept into the machinery.

There’s a punkish aggression to the arrangements now. The guitars have acquired an extra layer of fuzz and abrasion, while the vocals have become rawer, occasionally spat out with something approaching genuine venom.

But don’t mistake this newfound ferocity for a lack of discipline.

Beneath the noise are tightly constructed songs from a band increasingly confident enough to venture beyond the boundaries of the genre that first defined them.

Opener Closer sounds like a band finally breaking free of its cocoon, spreading its wings and discovering that the world outside is considerably stranger than expected.

A mechanical, techno drumbeat establishes the pulse, accompanied by a low electronic throb that gradually gathers momentum.

Great sheets of guitar distortion crash across the rhythm while Tom Littlewood’s vocals slice through the arrangement like an electric saw cutting through the ether.

There’s something of the more melodic end of industrial rock here, its mechanical insistence colliding with layer upon gleaming layer of shimmering guitars.

It’s shoegaze, certainly.

But not quite as we knew it.

Sinter barely pauses for breath before accelerating out of the starting blocks and charging headlong into a darker, more Gothic landscape.

The rhythm pounds relentlessly, the guitars snarl and the vocals shift between melodic passages and a rapid-fire delivery that owes almost as much to rap as it does to the band’s shoegaze contemporaries.

Littlewood sounds as though he’s attempting to expel every last fragment of emotion from his lungs.

Somebody had better stock up on throat lozenges before the next tour.

Porcelain drops the tempo without sacrificing any of the intensity.

Here, grunge and alternative rock enter the equation, with echoes of Nirvana at their most introspective and Pixies at their most visceral.

The guitars swell and recede around a melody that seems permanently on the verge of collapsing beneath its own emotional weight.

Close your eyes and the imagery practically assembles itself.

Grainy black-and-white film stock. Distorted figures moving through deserted streets. Strange, half-remembered visions that belong somewhere between a Gothic nightmare and an experimental film nobody entirely understands.

The song eventually dissolves into the enigmatic closing track, 1215, so seamlessly that it’s difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins.

This is a brief, feverish excursion into something more abstract, the music gradually losing its shape and drifting away like the final moments of an unusually vivid dream.

And then there’s Dogwhistle.

Of all the tracks here, this is perhaps the one most closely connected to Weave‘s earlier incarnation.

Guitars swirl and collide while the bass rumbles beneath them, creating the sort of enormous, hypnotic momentum that Swervedriver once purveyed to the nation.

It’s a reminder of where the band came from.

But perhaps that’s the point.

Weave‘s early shoegaze singles were a wonderful introduction to their sound, yet the band appear determined not to be defined by them.

Some of those original recordings have even disappeared from Spotify, as though the past itself is being quietly erased while a new musical identity takes shape.

Whether that’s a deliberate statement or simply the peculiar workings of the streaming world, the symbolism is difficult to ignore.

Thirst to Joy doesn’t sound like a band rejecting its influences. It sounds like one discovering that those influences were only ever the starting point.

The melodies remain. The atmosphere remains. But the musical possibilities have expanded considerably.

And Weave seem determined to explore every last one of them.

This is a band moving so fast that its past can’t keep up.

Thirst To Joy was released on a limited edition white vinyl. That is now sold out. You can still buy the standard black vinyl the bands Elastic Stage pages. It is also available on streaming services. Weave are currently on tour across the UK.