There’s a particular kind of patience required to make space rock feel expansive rather than indulgent. On Tower of Echoes, Newcastle Upon Tyne trio Echoes of Distant Stars lean into that tension, stretching time across two 21-minute compositions that feel like terrains to move through.
Formed in early 2025, the group consists of Alex Johnston (drums), Tom Astley (guitar), and Dave Molnar (bass). Their sound pulls from kosmische, progressive rock’s sense of scale, and the earthbound pull of folk, but rarely settles in any one place for long. Instead, the music unfolds in long-form, semi-improvised movements, where melody can dissolve into noise and rhythm can just as easily fracture as lock in.
The debut is split into two pieces: “Anomos” and “Archon.” “Anomos” sketches a stark, mineral world—rock, sand, and the faint suggestion of something once alive. It moves in slow tectonic shifts, guided by Johnston’s percussive weight and Molnar’s grounding bass, while Astley’s guitar oscillates between fragile, almost folk-like phrasing and blown-out, cosmic distortion.
If “Anomos” is outward-facing, “Archon” turns inward. It orbits the titular Tower of Echoes, a place that feels mythic. Here, the band leans further into atmosphere, allowing passages of quiet to stretch until they become uneasy, before collapsing into dense, swirling crescendos. Folk motifs flicker in and out of view, buried beneath layers of fuzz and feedback.
What ties both pieces together is the band’s instinct for contrast. Delicate melodic passages are routinely interrupted by bursts of cacophony; moments of clarity give way to disorientation. It’s a dynamic that keeps the music from drifting too far into abstraction, even as it resists traditional song structure.
For a debut, Tower of Echoes feels unusually self-assured in its scope. Rather than presenting a collection of tracks, Echoes of Distant Stars offers a pair of immersive environments—two worlds rendered in sound.
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