Creating experimental folk explorations, Australian artist Bjéar has released a project, the evocative new EP, After The Rain. Already known for creating emotional and atmospheric soundscapes, Bjéar has delivered a fantastic new entry with this four-track. The journey the music takes is as much narrative as sonically driven.
The first track, ‘Wind’, is pained, swelling from a lonely, defeated acoustic guitar into an intense, optimistic climate of gorgeous vocals and orchestral strings. ‘The Storm’ balances rain sounds with unsteady synthesisers, flattening out into warming pads and falling away.
Title track ‘After The Rain’ emerges from this like the first day of spring. Softly picked rhythms, again, start small, but slowly grow into an extended epic of flutes, strings and vocals. The final track, ‘A Journey Through Pristine Waters,’ is the perfect ending to this condensed emotional arc. In a way, it feels like an EP should: the full story of an album, stripped back into fewer, smaller, but equally powerful ideas.
On the project, Bjéar explains, “It’s about losing hope and finding hope, maybe even relocating the origin of your hope. It’s about mourning. It’s about patterns we live out. And it’s about the connection all of those ideas have with weather, water, wind, sunshine, spring, and how essential it can all end up feeling when it’s looked at through that lens. It’s more hopeful and at peace than the album is, and I find that releasing it first is narratively unique.”
The music was written across the Adelaide Hills, coastal South Australia, and Queenstown, New Zealand, reflecting the landscapes from which it was born. There’s power in the fragility of the artist, who has amassed over twenty million streams, and this is another work that cements his successes.
Listen here:
