The Antlers - Green To Gold (2021)

The Antlers – Green To Gold

Peter Silberman, the man behind beloved indie outfit The Antlers, has built his career on grand, conceptual catharsis. Every album in The Antlers oeuvre, especially their undeniable apex, 2009s Hospice, builds its theatrics on Silberman’s emotive persona. Combining anguish and euphoria in his lyricism with an equally timid and incensed delivery, the singer is often able to discover seemingly incompatible emotions within his narratives and push them to their furthest reaches.

That’s what makes The Antlers' first album in seven years so special. Not only has Silberman contributed another fantastic batch of tracks within a unified thematic, but he has given Antlers fans an entirely new sound. After their last album, 2014s Familiars, Silberman began to experience auditory issues, after complaining about excessive sound sensitivity he was diagnosed with a range of hearing issues in his left ear, from tinnitus to a rare form of Meniere’s disease. The singer, distressed and confused, decided to leave the city and move to the quiet surroundings of upstate New York, where he grew up. Now after taking the time to cope with his ailments, he’s created the only kind of music he could, in his words - The Antlers devoid of eeriness.

Like all Antlers albums, Green To Gold is a ruminative work, but this time Silberman has bathed the sound in a warm sepia aura. Each track has a luminosity evoking the bliss of a slower, homespun lifestyle, with only a minor undercurrent of melancholy to add to its complexion. That sound is never overbearing either, throughout the record Silberman structures the tracks as slow-building cascades of instrumentation, so that every nuance feels earned and all the more pleasing in its gratifying arrival.

Both verdant and mellow, Green To Gold is an album that takes the underlying beauty of every Antlers release and basks in its comforting glow. Without the edge of their earlier work, there is less at stake on their newest album, but in exchange, the listener gets a look inside Silberman’s unbridled domesticity and after seven years, that feels less like a summer drive and more like a sentimental triumph. Green To Gold is one of the best Antlers albums to date and an album unrivaled in its essential need to exist, both in Silberman’s life and in ours.

~9.0

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