THIS WILL DESTROY YOU

“Tunnel Blanket” is the third proper full length from THIS WILL DESTROY YOU. While previous albums managed to strike a universal chord of human hope and near-optimism toward the future, “Tunnel Blanket” is the darker and more intricate sides of human emotion, grief, and tragedy. It’s “pretty” in the way decomposition is pretty. It’s “artful” in the precise way that a sniper’s bullet passes through the largest artery is artful.

As the aural whallop of album-opener “Little Smoke” slams into listener consciousnesses, it become readily apparent that this album is about to take everyone involved down a very stark, bleak, and entirely introspective path. Whereas “Young Mountain” and “S/T” could be played in bookstores and coffee shops, the blackened density of “Tunnel Blanket” commands and provides entire immersion between the recording and the listener. This is not background music and you’re not going to play it at family gatherings.

There is still beauty in the latest from THIS WILL DESTROY YOU. In fact, this could easily be described as the most beautiful album the band has ever made. Yet it’s an entirely unconventional beauty that taps far below the soil that most bands dig their safe heels upon. In essence, “Tunnel Blanket” is humanity itself during its most beaten down and darkened times and at the end, it’s just as cathartic, instinctively primal, and wholly rewarding.