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Sweden’s stalwart, slow burning post-rock outfit Oh Hiroshima return to champion wonder and awe in an age of faded youth and jaded disenchantment. All Things Shining, the band’s fifth studio album, sees the project pared down to a brotherly core as they expand ever further into new sonic territories.
Founded over 15 years ago as a DIY post-rock recording project in Kristinehamn, Oh Hiroshima has steadily outgrown its Swedish hometown to become a highly regarded studio and live project within the international post-rock scene. With four diverse full-length albums to their name encompassing elements of shoegaze, electronica, post-punk and danceable indie-rock, Oh Hiroshima’s forthcoming fifth release, All Things Shining, represents a significant evolution in the band’s songwriting and soundcrafting.
All Things Shining is released today through Pelagic Records and is available to order through here. Read the band’s track by track guide on All Things Shining below…
1. ‘Wild Iris’
We wanted this album to start off in a more in-your-face kind of way, rather than with a long build-up intro, as many bands in our genre, including ourselves, usually do. As soon as we had this one, we knew it would do the trick. The foundation of the song, which is the verses with vocals and the long bridge in the middle, was taken from an old song I made for a Wovenhand-inspired project during a short Oh Hiroshima hiatus.
2. ‘Holiness Movement’
I had the intro guitar and vocals early on in the writing process, and later we merged it with the instrumental bridge in the middle, and things started to take form. There’s not as much brass on this record as on Myriad, but here we had Arvid Ageborg return with some lovely trombone. The lyrics revolve around nationalism and its tendencies towards violence, so it’s a bit anti-fascist, I guess.
3. ‘Swans in a Field’
A classic build-up and crescendo post-rock song, but with a twist. The title of the track comes from commuting to a neighboring town where I work as a teacher. In the rural areas between the towns, you can see a lot of swans out in the fields during springtime when they’re returning north. It’s always a really peaceful sight, and once I wrote down a few lines in Swedish to try to capture the feeling I had watching these beautiful creatures. I later translated those lines and made them the lyrics for this song.
4. ‘Secret Youth’
We chose this as the second single because it’s kind of different from Wild Iris, and we wanted to give a hint of the width of this album. The idea was to create a song inspired by the Pixies or Nirvana quiet verse, loud chorus dynamic. I’ve always been intrigued by the song ‘Light My Fire’ by The Doors, with its short verse-chorus structure and long psych-jam before returning to the chorus. That inspired the long bridge in this song.
5. ‘Rite of Passage’
The lyrics are an attempt to paraphrase the short story “Father and I” by Pär Lagerkvist. I had just read it while working on the lyrics, and it hit me in a very personal way. I came up with the intro guitar while in the middle of the writing process for the album and knew right away I could create a song based on it. Probably the most emotional delivery on the album.
6. ‘Deluge’
This song was actually written before Myriad, but the other guys in the band didn’t feel it matched the direction we were going for with that album. This time around it felt different, and we’re very pleased with how it turned out. It stands out from a lot of our previous work, but I think we found an interesting vibe in this song. Cello and background vocals are by my wife, Ellen.
7. ‘Leave Us Behind’
Like Deluge, this was also written before Myriad and dismissed at the time for the same reasons. I guess this is the most rock we’ve ever been. I have a feeling people will either love it or hate it. For the lyrics, I was influenced by Hartmut Rosa and his writing about acceleration and alienation in late modern society.
8. ‘Memorabilia’
The most obviously Radiohead-inspired song on the record. It will be interesting to see what people think about this one. It’s not really like anything we’ve written before, at least not the first half of the song. As our previous album ended with a sparse and stripped-down song, we thought it would be nice to end All Things Shining with a more epic closer.
