Words by Charles Steinberg

It’s always a nice surprise to find albums that reached broad consensus on the strength of instrumental composition alone. 

Among the notable 2023 offerings of this ever expanding and diversifying vast land of songwriting, Ryuichi Sakamoto bade a hushed farewell to this world with 12, a set of hovering piano recordings he likely knew would be his last, even if we didn’t. In the spectral realm of ambient composition, Laurel Halo created something hauntingly experiential on Atlas, maintaining the distance of sound you’d hear down the hallways and across the courtyards of dreamscapes, both good and bad ones.

But as for the coalescence of played instruments in a conversant sequence of songs that span the spectrum of moods, there wasn’t a more pure long play than End from post rock veterans Explosions In The Sky. One of year’s tightest productions in any genre, End unfolds like a short story in seven compelling parts, coursing with the vivid current that has energised and characterised the band through over twenty years and eight albums.

On its first studio album in seven years, the evolution of the band is born out in its measured manipulation of force, whether containing it through the valleys of ponderous ambiance or imposing it over peaks of exultant, drum blasted guitars. End is also an avowal of implicit fortitude, saying just as much, if not more, about where a band stands compared to its more standard lyrical rock counterparts.

Considering how little of a fuss the members of Explosions make of what drives the process of finding conceptual tone on any given recording, you do wonder if these natural developments in a band over time are so self evident that they don’t indulge deep analysis, or inquiry.

“I understand that, but I don’t think we feel that way. We don’t hold this notion of not talking about our process,” mocked drummer and co-composer Chris Hrasky with faux pomp from his Austin,Texas home just before the European leg of the current tour for End. “I guess our worry is that when we get asked about our process, our answers aren’t going to be that interesting (laughter). Nothing really crazy is going on.”

This is the kind of unassuming attitude about their craft that has sustained Explosions in the Sky from its outset, when the idea of scoring a feature film might have seemed like wishful thinking for a group of four friends with no delusions of grandeur, and who were arguably more aspirant towards making films than making music for them.

The searching post rock compositions Explosions is known for seems an automatic fit for scoring the moving picture, where drawn out passages of minimal instrumentation are effective in coaxing something internal or metaphorical, and grand, triumphant crescendos bring home the impact of dramatic action sequences. But that fit wasn’t so obvious to filmmakers, or the band for that matter, when they first formed in Austin in 1999.

It took the kind of open-mindedness of the likes of Brian Reitzell, the music supervising Yoda who gracefully coordinated the Lost In Translation soundtrack, to open the doors to an instrumental rock quartet like Explosions, recommending them for the sports movie hall-of-famer Friday Night Lights at a time where it was practically unheard of for a rock group to score a feature film (It’s still unusual). It turned out to be more of a natural fit than anyone could have expected. 

Featured loud and clear through Friday Night Lights was the triumphant,   battleground music that gave Explosions an identity as a band. According to Hrasky, because the exhilarating guitar climaxes stood out so prominently in the movie’s big moments, and were so effective in that context, the band has been selective in its score work overall,  so as to avoid being pegged by directors and producers to deliver that specific brand of crescendo core.

“We’ve been a band now for twenty-four years but we’ve only done a handful of scores. That’s because with a lot of the things we’ve been asked to do, they’ll want that Explosions thing of a lot of reverb and delayed guitars and sad, longing melodies.” says Hrasky tellingly. “We get associated with rousing songs because those are the ones people know, but we also have a lot of less popular songs that are dark and heavy and discordant. We got to do some of that on the Pete Berg film Lone Survivor. We've also been lucky to do a couple of small David Gordon Green films, along with David Wingo, and those scores don’t sound like anything we normally do…We like to do something different in our scoring.”

The desire to have film composition exist as an alternate creative zone independent of their approach on records, along with the circumstances that come with being a popular touring band has meant that potential scoring opportunities have needed to have a particular lure. It’s been nearly ten years since Explosions in the Sky soundtracked a narrative drama, with its score for 2014’s Manglehorn, and their current project for television has come along at an opportune time, when despite being comfortably settled into their personality and station a band, there’s still a motivation to be artistically challenged.

“In the show we’re working on now, there is a lot of bombast in the score but it’s not football touchdown music (á la Friday Night Lights),” shares Hrasky about the series he can’t fully discuss. “It’s big but it’s dark and upsetting. It’s basically about disparate groups in Utah trying to stake their claims in the 1880s and it’s very grim, as most US history is. We’re scoring massacre scenes, which just need to be the sound of insanity, and that’s been enjoyable because it’s not what we’re typically approached for in the soundtracking world.”

There are numerous examples of recording artists being selected to write and perform the music for film and television and that trend is ascending. Some of the most inventive scores of all time have been authored by musicians who were foremost recognised for their contributions in a pop group. But there are few examples of original feature scores from full rock bands. One that has succeeded in repurposing their style for the visual narrative, and doing so in a way that subsumes that style into the director’s vision, is Mogwai. Explosions essentially credits their neighbours in style for their own existence, proudly following in the footsteps of the Scottish instrumental rock quartet that has earned godfather status in the genre.

“The first time I heard Mogwai, I saw them play in Chicago. I was living there at the time a couple years before I moved to Austin,” recollects Hrasky, citing what could be seen in a way as his band’s point of genesis. “They were opening for a friend’s band and I think this was their first US tour. (Their first record) Young Team had just come out. It was just relatable. There was ambition to it but at the same time it seemed attainable. They looked like the Scottish version of your buddies, just these regular skate dudes with guitars and some pedals. But they played this overwhelming, beautiful, but at times aggressive music that was so much different than anything else really going at the time, as far as I could tell.”

Hrasky bought Mogwai’s first album Young Team the next day and apparent in equal measure on that record was the same kind of unspoken understanding between band members he had witnessed on stage the previous night. It inspired him to find that synchronicity with the other founding Explosions members as their friendship and collective musical pursuits took shape in Austin. Mogwai presented not just a model of stability, but an influential post of aesthetic departure.

“Being in a band and having it be instrumental was absolutely connected to Mogwai, and also Dirty Three. We were obsessed with those two bands at the time,” recalls Hrasky. “There were other instrumental bands, Tortoise was big and I was into them, but it didn’t provide me with the cathartic, emotional experience that Mogwai or Dirty Three did. Like, you could cry to their songs, and I love that. That was what I responded to in music: an overwhelming sadness. It was also the grand emotional arc of a Mogwai song, and the sheer beauty of it.”

Even ardent fans of rock music in all its variations will need to be persuaded that instrumental tracks can be just as vulnerable as a lyrical confession of love, or as subdued as one of suffering, as thrilling as one of rage. Look no further than the medium of film for the power of coordinated instrumentation in service of the communication of a feeling. It’s amazing how much can be loaded into the arrangement of a few notes and their pressure – the portals and nostalgic vacuums their framings allow. Explosions in the Sky attract the fans of music that seek it out for more than recreational entertainment, finding refuge in its confines. They lay down pastures for personal exploration, where each listener determines the scenery.

It’s not even always that the reprieve found amidst an Explosions track, or a Mogwai track, or a This Will Destroy you track is sought intentionally. Sometimes one creeps across your conscious state like a passing storm, and something you didn’t know was obscured is revealed. Some imagined scenery comes into focus, some detail of lives with others shifts into perspective, a memory is unlocked. As a purveyor of this experience, Hrasky is unequivocal of its purpose:

“When I listen to wordless music, even if it’s some Stars of the Lid ambient drone thing, it’s not just something I have on in the background. It isn't simply that this music will relax me. It fires my imagination, and my memory, and there are these little narratives that you start concocting in your head. Particularly these days when it feels like everyone is getting screamed on, there is a relief in getting lost in that. Even if it’s really heavy music, it exists outside of everything else in a way that appeals to me.”

Explosions in the Sky compositions, especially in their deliberately arranged sequence on an album, evoke the gamut of responses. While acknowledging the potency of their music to form deeply personal associations within its listeners, the band has always been wary of assigning any specific meaning or contextualisation to their recordings. But in the practice of scoring, there can be something inherently contrary to maintaining neutrality in what you write, where part of the role of a composer is to assign meaning to something that is ambiguous or suggested.

“For us they’re two very different procedures.” says Hrasky in making the distinction. “In soundtracking, there’s a map in front of you, whether it be a scene or script or notes from a director. We can try what we want and argue that it works better than the obvious emotion, but ultimately it’s the vision of the director or music supervisor. In some sense it’s easier to have that guide. When we’re writing our own music, we don’t have a narrative to follow.”

In fact, there wasn’t even picture to follow on the current project. Asked to rely on pure instinct to come up with temp music based on nothing more than a general conceptual cue, the band found itself in an unusual position for a score composer: as a dictator of the assembly and flow of footage, rather than a reactor to it. As someone who had always scored to picture and the instrumentalist meant to punctuate the beats of sequence in percussive metre, Hrasky found this initial dynamic of the current project both challenging and amusing.

“Especially doing the drums and percussion, I didn’t know when anything was supposed to be happening,” he laughs. “It’s like, I can play drums over this but you definitely need to tell me where there should not be drums. The direction would be ‘Give us six minutes of a massacre. But as you’ve not seen the massacre, just give us what you think that would sound like.’ But in a way, writing the temp music is cool because we feel like we’re informing the edit somehow."

Even though Explosions in the Sky is still making records and selling out shows, a certain amount of overall reflection on a career is inevitable for a band distinguished for its longevity. Maybe it's a thing with Texans, or maybe Hrasky’s peaceful, easy going demeanour was actually the result of being wiped out from the demands of touring again after three years, but he relates a level of contentment reached when talking about where his band is now and earnest gratitude for how far it has come.

“As a band, unless something crazy happens, I don’t think we'll somehow get bigger than we are now. We’ve kind of plateaued at a pretty comfortable spot. We play nice size shows but it’s not like that many people know who we are. It’s a nice happy medium…When I was twelve years old, the two things I wanted to do was make movies and be in a rock band. The other guys in the band are kind of the same way. It’s interesting that years later, we’re sorta in that world.”

Whether or not the kind of wordless, cathartic music Explosions in the Sky creates reaches wider recognition is not a priority concern. Frankly it never was. At this point, much like their carriage across those middle passages traversed in their songs, they're able to slow down and enjoy the scenery.

End, the new album from Explosions In The Sky, is available now.