The Antlers

The Antlers’ seventh album Blight asks many questions without offering easy answers. Over the course of nine songs, singer and primary songwriter Peter Silberman reckons with our passively destructive tendencies: absentminded pollution, unwitting wastefulness, and the inadvertent devastation of the natural world. But despite its heavy themes, Blight is far from a punishing listen. With its adventurous arrangements and persistent momentum, it plays more like an iridescent odyssey.

The album was recorded over the course of a few years, with the lion’s share tracked and produced in Silberman’s home studio in upstate New York, a compact outbuilding perched at the edge of a neighbor’s sprawling hayfield. “So much of the record was conceived while walking these massive fields,” he says. “I felt like I was wandering around an abandoned planet.”

And in a sense, Blight does feel like science fiction, sounding as if it was delivered from the near-future. The album is a work of meticulous world-building, teeming with ear candy and surprising stylistic shifts. While many songs begin with sparse elements— a fingerpicked guitar, hypnotic organ stabs, or a nimble piano melody— they rarely remain tethered to their foundations. They often reimagine themselves partway through, shifting mid-track from gentle ballad to throbbing electronica, only to land somewhere entirely different by the end.

Silberman’s distinctive vocals are spotlit, showcasing a broad range that climbs from whisper to bellow before soaring to the howling falsetto the singer has become known for. His lyricism is foregrounded throughout, nowhere more so than on the eerie “Deactivate”, during which he envisions a cascading series of apocalyptic events in uninterrupted verses, barely sneaking breaths between phrases. His tone pivots from dread to tranquility as the music slips into a heavenly escape.

Opener “Consider the Source”, with its bare piano chords and smooth, steady backbeat, lays out a soulful confession of careless consumption, an awakening to ubiquitous “broken cords”, “takeout trays”, and the numerous byproducts of modern life, pointedly asking, “Is it enough to add to cart with buyer’s remorse?” But rather than direct blame out toward society, he turns the lens inward.

“Lately I’ve become more aware of the cost of convenience, how the choices I make as a consumer seem insignificant, but can add up to something disastrous,” Silberman says. “These songs were born out of an attempt to come to grips with my guilt.”

Introspection is a quality that listeners have come to expect from The Antlers. Silberman has been confronting weighty matters ever since his project’s 2009 breakthrough Hospice, the unrelentingly-heavy concept album about a child cancer patient and her caregiver. Hospice addressed psychological abuse and post-traumatic stress with explicit detail and unflinching vulnerability, resonating equally with those grieving loved ones and rocky relationships.

That album’s ambitious sonics— an unlikely amalgam of intimate folk confessionals, haunted soundscapes and sky-scraping post-rock— belied its modest origins: Hospice was mostly recorded alone in Silberman’s Brooklyn bedroom, with an economy of equipment and hardly any expectant audience. The surprise popularity of Hospice found The Antlers on a rapid ascent, touring globally as a 3-piece band, playing major festivals and supporting such luminaries as The National and Explosions in the Sky.

The releases that followed Hospice grew their sizable following while resisting the impulse to rehash initial success. The electronic pop of 2011’s Burst Apart, the aquatic psychedelia of 2012’s Undersea EP, and the brass-laden soul of 2014’s Familiars embraced the band’s ingenuity. Those albums subverted expectations, expanding their emotional palette beyond the morose rage and desperation that characterized Hospice to reveal a playful expansiveness. As a live entity, the band eschewed replicating their recordings, trading lush orchestration for wall-of-sound maximalism and thunderous dynamics.

But Silberman was forced to scale back after an unexpected hearing incident left him temporarily deaf in one ear and hypersensitive to sound. Putting the band on pause, he made 2017’s Impermanence, a meditative and minimal solo album, pairing his then-fragile voice with gentle guitar and an abundance of silence.

After regaining his hearing and recovering from vocal cord surgery, Silberman and longtime drummer Michael Lerner revived The Antlers for 2021’s Green to Gold, a rustic folk-tinged collection of songs notably devoid of the darkness that characterized previous work. Green to Gold instead painted in sepia tones, pondering time’s effect on friendships and long-term relationships.

Following Green to Gold, Silberman honed his collaborative chops, including co-producing Wild Pink’s critically-acclaimed breakout ILYSM. Shortly thereafter, he released the debut album from Cowboy Sadness, his long-running instrumental band with David Moore (Bing & Ruth) and Nicholas Principe (Port St. Willow).

During these intervening years between Antlers albums, Silberman and Lerner kept busy as well— the duo released a series of free-standing singles, unified by acid-dipped timbres, shape-shifting production, and impressionistic imagery.

“These singles were metaphysical songs about connection with nature, which in turn put me in touch with all the ways that nature is under threat,” he says. “The smell of wildfire smoke on a sunny afternoon, the sound of chainsaws on a hike through the woods— these contradictions became impossible to ignore.”

One such juxtaposition inspired Blight’s second track. “Pour” unfolds like a modern folktale, with Silberman lamenting the effects of a long-ago chemical spill on his quiet, rural neighborhood. A solitary nylon-string guitar is plucked against a ticking timepiece, until both succumb to sludgy undulations and pitter-patter percussion.

“Carnage” is a roadkill murder ballad that lurks in a brooding crawl before erupting into full-band maelstrom. Silberman’s roaring Telecaster swarms around Lerner’s cacophonous drumming, harnessing an energy the outfit has long conjured in a live setting but until now never put to tape.

“Something in the Air” is among the most chilling of all these, illustrating an ambiguous, unnamed threat that calls to mind any number of distressing headlines. The track contains the album’s most explosive moment— a blown-out orchestral jump-scare underscoring the implied force majeure.

Whereas Silberman’s past lyrics dealt in extended metaphors, Blight takes a more direct approach. In “Calamity”, for instance, he asks point-blank: “Who will look after what we leave behind?”

“The consequences of accelerating technology and environmental neglect feel imminent; that sense of urgency made me want to speak more candidly,” he explains. “The present-day specifics are so unsettling, and tomorrow’s possibilities are so surreal… there’s no need to mince words.”

The final and perhaps fundamental question posed by Blight appears in the penultimate track, the futuristic hymnal “A Great Flood”, in which Silberman wonders: “Will we be forgiven should there come a great flood to drown out our decisions?”

Like those before it, this question hangs in the air unanswered. Blight invites listeners to consider it for themselves, as if the survival of the natural world is in their hands, slowly slipping through their fingertips.