Full-volume fury: Godspeed You! Black Emperor's latest album
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. A lonesome guitar drone kicks off Grey Rubble—Green Shoots, the surprise-dropped lead single off the upcoming album by Canadian orchestral anarcho-punks Godspeed You! Black Emperor. It’s the sort of funereal, reverb-drenched keen that shatters the silence following a pre-dawn bombing raid, a wail of unadulterated despair stabbing at the sky.
More instruments join in—guitars, drums, Sophie Trudeau’s baleful violin—building up to a slow-burn crescendo, as the sun rises over a scene of gut-wrenching devastation. Painting in broad, looping brushstrokes, the band conjures up a desolate landscape. As with most of GB!YE’s music, the song is purely instrumental.
You don’t really need words to understand the tragic context from which Grey Rubble draws its blistering fury and suffocating dolour. But, unlike the post-rock contemporaries they had such a huge influence on, GB!YE have never hidden their message behind artful vagueness or enigmatic mystique. So they spell it out in the text that accompanies the single.
“Every day a new war crime, every day a flower bloom," it reads. The album’s name makes it even more explicit—NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD. It seems inevitable that the ongoing blood-letting in Gaza would drive GB!YE back to the studio, threnodic guitars and martial drums raging against the industrial slaughter. For decades now, the band has deployed guitars, strings, horns and tape loops in full-throated critique of neoliberal capitalism, and the depredations it has inflicted on the world.
The first iteration of GB!YE came together in Montreal in 1994, soon after Francis Fukuyama had declared the end of history. The Cold War had ended and capitalism had won. The
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