Tethered Hands - Tethered Hands (2025)

Pianist Joseph D. E. Phillips and guitarist Daniel Rickards teamed up and released one of the best post-rock albums of the first months of 2025. The cinematic instrumental music in which guitar doesn't play the central part is a great proposition for fans of the genre, who look for names outside of the post-rock mainstream.

Even the artists themselves call it "some of the best post-rock of their career", and, while I don't track their discographies, I can say there's a good chance that's true. The compositions, while sounding somewhat minimal at times (perfectly natural for a post-rock duo), strike with well-thought-through structures and great focus on the darker, more solemn atmosphere. The piano keys and violin strings are the perfect fit for this kind of music and, I admit, I'm a sucker for this combination. This track list could easily be a movie score, for some kind of noir and slightly pompous movie, but unlike most of movie scores, it has no moments of boring, schematic shallows.

I understand that it's not easy to achieve GY!BE-sque grandeur as two people, but the British-American duo is certainly close.

Tethered Hands costs 6 USD.

Check: Darkened Skies - Our City in Ruins

Country: Indiana, US/UK

Genre: cinematic post-rock

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