ŁŚ Magazine before 5NDREAS: Telepathy (UK)

My blog became the official media partner of the 5NDREAS Festival and my task is to fill in the remaining 3 weeks of wait with something interesting. And what could be more interesting than reading about the bands that are about to play on the stage at Feierwerk Kranhalle in Munich? Yeah? This time it's one of the headliners so strap on!

The British band Telepathy grows from album to album: starting from the post-metal oozing with the teenage angst to now produce music that merges genres and delivers some interesting messages. Their latest album, Transmissions features synths, electronic sounds and tons of samples, including one from a Polish statesman from a hundred years ago.

I had a long chat with Albert and Richard about the Polish elements in Telepathy's music, their sound evolution and how John Travolta (almost) defined the band's future. Dig in!

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ŁŚ: Albert, you play in Telepathy alongside two brothers, Piotr and Krystian. It’s quite a unique situation. How do you like that?

Albert Turek: Good question. Let me first and foremost say that, even though Richard is not blood related, he is essentially a brother from another mother. Before we started playing together, I heard Richard's riffs and thought to myself: “oh, hang on, this guy has something up his sleeve!”. And then I got my brother, who I was doing a lot of music with throughout the years, and then that's kind of how it formed. Without Richard, Telepathy definitely wouldn't have come to be as it is.

But do I like it? Yeah, I love it! It adds a form of understanding without saying, without words that you can't have sometimes with someone you haven't grown up with or you're not related with. And it's a double-edged sword, of course, because that also means that when we clash, it's probably twice as painful sometimes, you know?

And I guess I might say as well that I'm quite fortunate that I do have really good rapport and sort of like friendship essentially with my brothers because I know that not everybody does, people tend to go different ways.

And it was quite interesting how we grew up together, even though there's quite an age gap between myself and Piotr and Krystian. So you would think that it would create a gap between us, but not really. We grew up together and I used to hang out with their mates more than with mates of my own age. I used to just be that annoying little brother, you know, that they didn't want to have around, but I was there and they had to deal with it. 

Richard Powley: Yeah, I think we've been in the band for so long and I know the guys so well. It's like I've been adopted. I've got two families instead of one, if you know what I mean.

Richard shows off the Polish influences in his refrigerator (it's pierogi)

AT: Well, that's the kind of magic that my mother has on people. You know how Polish hospitality can be. It was like: “you know, you're now one of my sons. So you better eat up and get used to it!”.

ŁŚ: Just take off the shoes right before you enter.

AT: Yeah (laughs)

RP: I'm between Albert and Peter in age, which means that we all had similar musical touch points. If one of us said: “oh, this sounds like a Tool riff” or “this sounds like a Deftones part”, everyone knows what they mean. It's second nature at this point and I don't really think about the fact that they're all brothers, you know?

ŁŚ: They're more like band mates than family.

RP: I would probably say more like family than band mates.

ŁŚ: Rich, does it mean that you're exposed to Polish culture?

RP: Just by osmosis, really, and just being around them, I'm probably more aware of Polish history than the average English guy. I'm more aware of Polish food. I suppose if you ask the average guy walking down the street in England, have you heard of Acid Drinkers? They're going to say no, but I'm well aware of Acid Drinkers and Coma and bands like this, you know?

ŁŚ: You're aware of Coma?! Do you like them?

RP: Not the worst thing in the world (laughs).

Coma - not a band I've ever thought would feature on my blog

AT: And it works both ways. British people are a bit like the ocean. They're not so straightforward. If a Polish person doesn't like you, they will probably tell you. And if they have a dark joke, they'll just throw it. British people are slightly more like coming in waves and slowly eroding you. And if you don't adapt to that, they eventually leave you alone, but that also means they exclude you, which then leaves you kind of isolated. This wave motion, it's the current that kind of pushes you away at first, but it actually draws you back in. I found this out because I moved to England when I was 13. And when I went to school here, it was quite a shock. I didn't realize that by making all these jokes, taking a mickey out of me, people actually wanted to bring me in.

It was inevitable. I feel like this is my second home for sure, in fact, when I go back to Poland, Poland often feels more exotic to me than Britain.

ŁŚ: Let’s finally get to your music. I was thinking about the name of your band. A common definition of telepathy would be something like “direct transmission of thoughts without using means of speech or other known channels of communication”. Would you agree that instrumental music would be some kind of telepathy in that way, because what you're essentially doing is trying to transmit some kind of emotions or even ideas through means that are not usually used to do that?

AT: I think there are two answers to this, the PR answer is: yes, absolutely! 

RP: That's what we’ve had in mind all along!

AT: The more transparent answer is that the name of the band came from the telepathic experiments by a Rupert Sheldrake Krystian was kind of researching at that time. He was trying to predict how many times a person will recognize who's calling them when the call comes through. And the studies show that more than 60% of the time relatives could guess who is calling them. I think the initial idea for our name was Telepaths but then our good friend sat with us and said: “no, that doesn't sound great. How about just Telepathy?”

Rupert Sheldrake and one of the questions he ponders over

I really actually enjoy the fact that we come from a place of total discovery rather than some sort of pre-engineered, predestined way of looking at music. Richard came from this indie punk zones of aggressive riffs and just going a bit crazy. I loved it. I picked it up. We came from this more, I would say, thrash metal scene with Piotr. We wanted to make a bit of angry music at first, something different a bit, a little bit effed up. And then, it slowly started becoming more mature. With time, we became slightly more apt at transferring different emotions into music, not just teenage frustration and anger. 

RP: I think I've not really heard it put the way you put it, Kuba, I really liked it. But I think I'm sure Albert would agree that naming a band is the hardest thing to do when you start a band. The hours we spent thinking of different names and then this one just stuck. 

AT: I was trying to remember some of the names we thought we would call this band. And I remember that there was something about John Travolta.

RP: It was going to be called just Travolta. Thank God we didn't end up with that.

Travolta - Transmissions (2025) from the alternative universe where the band ended up with that.

AT: In our defence, we were also massive movie fans. There were essentially three topics between us at first: music, films and, again, probably music. What you also might find interesting is that a lot of people are very surprised when we tell them the name of our band. It's apparently a very rare word that they haven't heard in ages. “How do you spell that?!”

But there are slightly weird people as well, those who believe in questionable theories, perhaps. We do get some strange emails sometimes, I admit.

ŁŚ: Last year you released Transmissions. I feel like there is some kind of theme behind this album, which I don't fully grasp. Can you explain what it is about?

AT: The theme was, to put it in the most simplest form that I can, trying to encapsulate the feeling of everything that's now become ordinary not being that. That essentially every discovery we've made eventually became so adapted into society that it became just taken for granted.

There was this moment I sat down with Krystian, Richard and Piotr and discussed this concept. And we were listening to plenty of these old radio recordings and we listened to the radio recording of Józef Piłsudski [“a Polish statesman who served as the Chief of State (1918–1922) and first Marshal of Poland (from 1920)” - author’s note, taken from Wikipedia] speaking out and kind of being fascinated with the voice recording technology. And, to him at the time, it felt kind of ridiculous. What's this? What's the real purpose of this? 

I mean, how many times in history did people feel like this? Something being on the precipice of discovery is, I guess, the theme of this album. And life being like this in general, whether you are taking out the trash in the morning or having your coffee or playing the gig you've always dreamed of, whatever the moment is, it's some form of discovery and you're on a precipice of something that hasn't happened before yet we very quickly forget and normalize all that.

RP: The other thing was that with the sense of discovery come excitement and fear and they are really very similar emotions. 

I think quite a lot of what we do, especially when the band plays live. It's a very visceral experience. It's really happening, you know. If we're present now, then we can be aware that these things are great, these things are actually happening.

ŁŚ: I love the inclusion of Piłsudski’s speech on A Silent Bridge. It made me listen more carefully to what he's saying, and it shocks me that he poses questions like “I'm recording my voice now, does it mean that I still own it? Or whose property does it become?” It’s crazy that we are saying the very same things now with the advent of AI technology. 

AT: What he was saying applies pretty much all the time, every time, everywhere. And at the ending part of End Transmission, there is a bit of a dialogue that mentions that if you stay in that place long enough, you may be perceived as a madman. The point of it is not to just stay there.

I think Piłsudski embraced the moment fully. I think it's very much a worthwhile thing to embrace the moment meaningfully and have a bit of a reflection on it. And recognize that no moment is ordinary. So yeah, maybe it's a bit cheesy actually, live in the moment.

ŁŚ: Transmissions, besides the theme behind it, is also interesting because it proves what you already said earlier, that your sound is constantly evolving. It is quite a complex album sound-wise. Was it a conscious decision or is it more like something that happened organically?

RP: I think it was more of an organic thing. Over the years, all of us have had different projects that are more electronic. We came to a point where we were comfortable enough composing in other ways than just like guitar, bass, drums. We finally felt we could bring it into the Telepathy world. We all felt after the last record we did, Burn Embrace, that we wanted something fresh. And that just happened to be how it came out. I think the beautiful thing about it for me is that it's closer to what I imagined the band could be when we started. If you had told me 10 years ago you're going to have an album like Transmissions, I would have been thrilled. But I think at the time we didn't yet have the capability to do it.

AT: Yeah, there was definitely a lot of learning to do. And we owe a lot of that to the people we've worked with over the years. You could say they schooled us on a lot of this stuff, because, like I said, we had just angry, crazy riffs to begin with and we just laid them down. We had a lot of reviews saying “this is a mess” but some people said “this is a fantastic mess” too.

We learned more about music, more about instruments. So it definitely evolved our way of writing music and making sense of melodies and how they progress. Another thing is that, as I mentioned earlier, we were fascinated by music and films. And that became extremely apparent for myself and Piotr especially, who ended up doing his degree in composing music. We wanted to make our sound even more cinematic because what we started making felt epic. And a lot of people started saying: “oh, I could hear this in a movie” or “I could hear this in a video game”. That probably makes sense because we love film music.

So that caused a lot of sound evolution. And yeah, synthesizers have helped with that a lot. They created another kind of layer that was just so fun to explore for us.

ŁŚ: But the evolution of the sound, well, just like any evolution, doesn't stop, right? Do you think that you're going to go in a particular direction with your sound in the future? And what direction would it be?

AT: Now that we've established that we can merge these two worlds, the metal and the synths, which we were kind of a bit scared to do at first, we've got proof we can do this. So now I want to go back and give some love to the old stuff that we used to do, which is the riffs and the bollock that the music had back in the day. And I would personally like to ramp that up.  Whether that's going to translate, we'll see, because it's just my thinking.

But we haven't yet started properly going into the next album phase. We're still enjoying Transmissions. We're still exploring the album ourselves, because that has been the case with pretty much every album we’ve ever done, especially Tempest. It felt like three years of touring it and we were just putting in new twists on top of the compositions and learning that maybe some different ways of playing sound a bit better. Ultimately playing live is what really gave us the kind of the feelings we aimed for.

RP: And we're already working on something quite new in the scene when it comes to sound development. We're working with a company called TiMax. They do audio installations, for example in the Royal Albert Hall. We're trying to make a spacial sound version of the record and we're going to do a couple of special concerts with 16, 24 speakers. As an audience member, you'll be inside the record as we play it.

TiMax Spatial Studio in London

ŁŚ: It’s a good thing that you mentioned Tempest and this evolution of sound, because it’s just been announced that you will be releasing a remastered version of this album. Does it mean that it's actually based on the experience from the live shows like you said? 

RP: Essentially, when we started touring Transmissions, we wanted to update the older material that we'd be playing. And Piotr wrote the synthesizer arrangements for those as we were preparing to go on tour. The album was coming up for a 10 year anniversary and, as we still love playing these tracks, we thought: “okay, it's been out of print on vinyl for a while” and we talked to Pelagic, they were into re-releasing it.

We wanted to include the new versions of these two songs. And yeah, the way they've been written and constructed is a result of getting that material ready to play live.

AT: There was too much of a contrast in the way it felt to play some of the old songs that people really liked. Hiraeth, for example, is a big one across our fan base and people love to hear it. And we love to play it, but we wanted to bring it into line with Transmissions. 

ŁŚ: In one of your interviews, Rich, when you were asked about potential collaboration with other artists, you said that you prefer to have everything done internally within the band. But this year, you released an album with remixes made by some big names.

RP: Yeah, yeah, totally changed my mind. When I was a bit younger, I was a bit more closed off to working with other people maybe. And I think in the years since, I've had a great time working with other people and being able to learn from what they do.

Transmissions having such a kind of varied sonic palette, and almost a new identity for the band, it felt really interesting to give parts of these songs to maybe more electronic-focused artists and see where they could take it and really expand what we wanted to do as a band.

And it's been a great experience. We worked with Jo [Quail - author’s note] on the previous record, Burn Embrace, and she was playing acoustic cello, because that was really a kind of earthy sounding album. And for this remix EP, we've rebuilt the song as a beat-focused, almost trip-hop sounding track, with her playing electric cello. And it's amazing.

ŁŚ: Please tell me that Jo is as amazing in real life as she is on the stage.

RP: Yeah, yeah, she's a wonderful person. 

AT: We had the pleasure of working with her for the Burn Embrace album as Richard mentioned. She actually had injured her hand just a week or so before and she still came to the studio and still did like 6 hours of cello playing for us.

So not only a wonderful person but also very committed and just extremely professional. I’d like to make people aware that on Burn Embrace, the title track from this album, the last bit that you hear Jo Quail playing is her first and last take. She came to the studio and I said to her: “just play something over that bit”. And she did. Jaime Gomez pressed record, pressed stop and that’s all. And we were just mesmerized. This was one of the most beautiful bits we've ever heard.

RP: And for this collaboration track, we sent her the remix, she said “oh, I love it. I want to be part of it”. And what we got back from her was about 36 different tracks of cello, loads of ideas. And some of these tracks I wish people could hear because they sound completely alien to what you would imagine a cello could sound like. Some of them are in the track that we released, but no one's ever going to know this was a cello. She's a master of her instrument.

Jo Quail, not only wonderful person, but also extremely professional

ŁŚ: You're coming to the 5NDREAS festival in Munich. What's the most important thing for you when performing live? What's the thing that you like to focus on when you're on the stage? I'm asking because this will tell us, the audience, what to expect, if there's anyone who's never seen you performing live.

RP: For me a live show got to be an emotional and kind of physical version of the record. Just dialed up more than you can get from listening at home, if you like. The most important thing is the connection between the band and the crowd. As a performer, when you're halfway through the first song, you can kind of already tell this connection is there and it's working. I want to feel the music as much as hear it when I go to a live concert.

AT: For me, I get surprised at which point certain people tend to switch on to our music. There are bits that are the big hits that we know people like the most. But actually sometimes I'll be playing along and I love this particular bit, but I feel like it's underheard. And then suddenly out of the periphery, I see someone absolutely rocking the shit out to that bit too. And I'm like: “that person gets it”.

Another thing is that I always try and make sure that I'm a bit more relaxed because it's always nerve-wracking. Any time I go up on stage, it could be the smallest or the biggest show, I’d never say “oh, I've done it, 500 times”. No. Every time it’s more like “oh shit we're doing this!”. 

RP: Still, we're so f*cking lucky that we can go on tour with Long Distance Calling, play in some amazing venues and then finish it off playing in Munich, a place we've never been to before. We've been invited to headline this first day of this festival, and it's an incredible thing to be able to do. Just as a person, I feel honoured to be able to do that. 🦢

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Telepathy will perform at the 5NDREAS Festival on Friday 27.11.

Save your ticket now (limited availability): https://rausgegangen.de/events/5ndreas-postrock-festival-0/

Check the event on FB: https://fb.me/e/8cyEexXaV

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Threestepstotheocean - Death of Permanence (2026)

16 October has to be some kind of saint patron of post-rock's day as on this date, several great names within the genre released their new albums. But even though some of them were REALLY great names (like Caspian or Ranges), the album that really caught my attention came from the Italian outfit Threestepstotheocean and it's no surprise as it's just a continuation of their fantastic and well-leveled discography.

It's already 6 years since Del fuoco was released (the one with Dispersi, one of my favourite post-rock tracks ever) so I was curious if the band can keep up the level of intricacy and emotional content on their new album. And I was not disappointed, not in the slightest. This is the kind of post-rock that may not impress with the level of noise the audience is receiving but that's not the point: the point is to create artful compositions woven out of various elements to become a coherent piece. Sometimes i sounds like  guitar-heavy post-rock, sometimes it's closer to electronica and trip-hope vibes. I like all the ways the band employs not to stand still. And it's not only the feature of their sound, in fact, the band dedicates the entire album to the idea that "much of what we consider stable or permanent is bound to shift, dissolve, or disappear". Movement and change.

And yes, the intriguing sound also means interesting collaborations like the one with a Sardinian vocalist Dalila Kayros on the very trip-hoppy and folky Black Syrup or with the Italian band Moonilt in the dense and meaty Every Time I Dive. Not the one with Conny Ochs, but everything else is really, really good.

Death of Permanence costs 8 EUR.

Check: Eternity Is a Glitch

Country: Italy

Genre: artful post-rock

Label: Narcotica/Subsound Records

Threestepstotheocean - Del fuoco (2020)

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Kallsup - Alldeles för nära (2026)

Is my favourite new dreamy indie rock band coming from Sweden? Very possible. Kallsup made my list of favourite things already with their debut album last year, but they didn't want us to wait long for another treat and went ahead and released the sophomore Alldeles för nära already 1.5 year later. And the moody hits they create certainly deliver.

The slightly hidden and dispersed vocals with the dense guitar music (there are 6 people in the band and you can hear it) hit you like a tank. The band creates music that is both loud and extremely melodic, the way they write hit songs like Kino or Undantagshelgen tells you something about how talented they are. But the thing is that the album does not only contain the melodic bangers, but also some tracks the purpose of which is to create the oneiric and slightly melancholic atmosphere with psychedelic compositions like, especially, the one in Min största vän.

I could point to several songs worth checking out (Imma, Fritt fall, but I'm gonna be a banger sucker this time and tell you to go and listen to the radio hit and a single track Kino (... and it's so interesting that this is the second Swedish band with a song called Kino after Star of Heaven who started as a Kino (pop-rock band from the east) cover band as it was revealed in my interview with the Swedes).

Alldeles för nära costs 9 EUR.

Check: Kino 

Country: Sweden

Genre: dreamy indie rock

Label: VÅRØ

Kallsup - En sista räddning (2025)

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Stone Anthem - Solus Rex (2026)

Archie Ingram makes his music as Stone Anthem and he certainly knows how to blend genres together to achieve a melancholic and beautiful mix. The ambient and slowcore and dream pop and singer/songwriter, everything has its place on the 9th (already!) album by the Coventry-based artist.

"My work kind of lives somewhere between a glitch and memory fragments of detuned voices field recordings processed until they feel fictional rhythms that almost repeat but never quite land the same way twice..." the artist describes his music before adding something that really got to me: "Imagine music that feels like it’s remembering itself incorrectly." Yes, that's it: not only does the sentence encapsulate the dreamy atmosphere of the ambient pop on the album, but also how it was created with the repetetitions and loops. The intimate, lo-fi atmosphere adds to this unreal, oneiric vibe.

By the way, while describing the artist, the label states that Ingram started the project in 2019 when he was... 12 years old. That can't be right, right? RIGHT?!

Solus Rex costs 9.5 EUR (8 GBP).

Check: Damaged

Country: UK

Genre: ambient pop

Label: Glass Modern

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Ovoo - Obsidian (2026)

Project that creates "post-industrial, ambient, noise" music that goes so far that it basically becomes post-rock played in weird way. But it sounds SO GOOD! The French duo looks like experimental electronic musicians on the stage but they sound like dunk!festival regulars and they just released their debut album with some interestingly psychedelic cover.

Those psychedelic and space-focused themes seem to be the main drive of the two artists known as Astrocyte Jfi and Sid negativv. The motives here are interestingly described as the love of "antiquity-retrofuturism, space-time labyrinths". The sci-fi cinematic works (most notable Dune) that marry the future with the concept of the evolution of civilization(s) seem to prevail, but the sound of music is not entirely what I'd describe as the space post-rock (like the one from Beyond the Event Horizon). The psychedelic guitar post-rock is what I'd describe them, although... I don't think they even use guitars. Instead, the drums are accompanied by "Korg MS 2O instrumentation, the Osmose next-generation instrument" which I have to quote from their biography as I have no idea about any technicalities regarding synthesizers. But I guess it's important.

What is important to me, though, is the ease with which the duo creates the soundscapes that feel both cinematically vast and brutally powerful without compromising the melodic side of their compositions. It's the kind of music that isn't million miles away either from sci-fi soundtracks (I'm thinking The Invincible video game for example) or psychedelic, desert-like heavy instrumental music. Really, the best of two worlds (or planets if you will).

Obsidian costs 7 EUR.

Check: II

Country: France

Genre: post-industrial post-rock

Label: Arsenic Solaris

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ŁŚ Magazine before 5NDREAS: Star of Heaven (SE)

My blog became the official media partner of the 5NDREAS Festival and my task is to fill in the remaining 4 weeks of wait with something interesting. And what could be more interesting than reading about the bands that are about to play on the stage at Feierwerk Kranhalle in Munich? Yeah? It's time for the 3rd one today.

It's not enough to say that they mix post-rock with (neo)classical music, they literally make the former as if it was the latter. Star of Heaven finally released their third album this year and Kyrie is more than inspired by Mozart's works. Not only that, their compositions are so beautiful, so striking, that they should be played in concert halls. It's our luck that we'll hear them on a post-rock festival.

I talked with Anna, Tove and Rasmus, 3/5 of the lineup. And although some of the Scandinavian reserved nature was clearly noticeable, we had a great conversation in the end. Thank you, guys!

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ŁŚ: When I listen to your sound, I feel like it comes from two different worlds, from the world of neoclassical music and from the world of post-rock music. Do you think that there is a connection between those two?

Anna Löfstrand: There is a connection. When I was young, I listened to classical music a lot. Then I started to listen to post-rock and after a while, I was like, “Oh! It's not such a big difference!”. They're similarly atmospheric and dynamic. I really like to listen for the post-rock elements in classical music, if you know what I mean. 

Rasmus Grip: I totally agree and I wish that we could learn more from classical music as one of the things I find boring with most music is that it repeats itself all the time. And the classical one doesn't really do that in the same way. From what I understand of its principles, it's mostly about variations of the same theme, playing it in a different way, sometimes stronger, sometimes faster, changing the tonality and so on. It’s also repetitions, but slightly different.

Tove Rhodiner: Both give more freedom as well. You can make a song go for 20 minutes or 3 minutes as well, while regular pop music is always around 4 minutes. We also do that thing that you said, Rasmus, that we have a theme, but we kind of reuse it in various  places and with various approaches. That makes it more interesting because every time time you hear it, you think of it in a new way. 

ŁŚ: Would you say that you are more like neoclassical post-rock or more like post-rock neoclassical? What's the more dominant world of music in your work?

AL: For me, it's post-rock. And this classical part is something that comes to us on its own, we didn't choose it to be our thing, we just started to make post-rock and it came to us.

RG: On the topic of classical music, perhaps we can add that our last release is very much inspired by this genre. What we did was we took the Great Mass, a mass written by Mozart, and chose one composition from it, called Kyrie. We slowed it down like maybe four times and then we tried to copy the dynamics of the result of the whole process. So let's say that the song is five minutes long. Then we slowed it down so it's 70 minutes long instead. And then we tried to follow the dynamics of the song. So when it's loud, we would be loud. And if it's bass and, let's say piccolo flute, then we tried to play bass and something that reminded us of a piccolo flute. So in that sense it's very, very much inspired by classical music.

Some of us like Arvo Pärt (Estonian composer - author’s note) as well, so we try to understand a bit how he does what he does.

ŁŚ: I wanted to ask you about those inspirations. Who inspires you the most? Except for Mozart, but we'll come back to Kyrie in a second.

RG: That's the funny thing about this band, everyone has different inspirations. Really, the favorite band of one of us may be a band someone else hates. And so on. So we have really opposing views, but me and Linus (Hjerpe, guitarist in Star of Heaven - author’s note), we listened mostly to metal music in our younger years. When I was growing up, Scandinavian black metal was a very big thing here in Sweden. 

ŁŚ: And you, Anna, you said you listen to classical music. I don't think you could have two more distant things, right? Black metal and classical music.

AL: I like so many different kinds of music. I like melodic music the most, but it could be any genre. 

ŁŚ: Like Abba?

AL: Yeah, for example! But I also like black metal. And when music gives me these dark melodic vibes, I'm immediately sold. It's also very much about the chord progression and things like that.

TR: I, for example, don't really listen to post-rock at all. And it means that I don't really know what I'm aiming for when playing music. And I think maybe that's partially why our band sounds like it does. Like something different. Perhaps we're aiming for post-rock because that's the closest thing to what we imagine, but then it ends up being something different.

AL: I often want to create a darker song, but it just becomes what it becomes. It feels like we can’t really control that.

RG: And you don't really want to either. For instance, I like Sigur Rós very much, but I don't want to try to make Sigur Rós music because that would feel like a pale copy. You want to try to find your own little niche, something you've never heard before.

ŁŚ: From my experience, the best post-rock comes from people who are not necessarily interested in creating post-rock. They want to make something unique and then they somehow end up creating some kind of post-rock.

TR: I think that if we weren’t labeled post-rock, some of our songs wouldn’t be considered as part of this genre.

RG: Since we use a lot of crescendos and stuff like that, we’re automatically thrown into that genre. That’s my take at least.

ŁŚ: What is the characteristic of post-rock music that you value the most? I could see that in some descriptions you mentioned the cinematic feeling of your music as one of those, but also the emotional component.

RG: I want to make music that is worthy, if you understand what I mean. Something you don't have to be ashamed of when it comes to the emotional moments. So it never sounds like clown music. Not that there’s anything wrong with clown music, but you wouldn't play it at the funeral, or perhaps you would, but that would be a very different type of funeral.

Music that is worthy, well suited for the dark or but also for the happy moments. 

ŁŚ: So we’re talking about emotions then. Is it easy for you to transform emotions you want to express into your music?

AL: Yeah, sometimes. I often feel like I want to express even more than we end up doing. I also easily become very happy when the music we make becomes something beautiful. I'm the one who is the most in love with our music. I'm our biggest fan (laughs).

Sometimes it's frustrating because you're looking for something that you can't really find. But at other times it's such a beautiful feeling just to sit there and play. And I think that's what I aim for, to just be in the middle of the emotions. Even if it sounds maybe a little bit cheesy.

TR: Coming back to your original question. I think describing our music as cinematic and emotional is more like an afterthought. It's not like we're always aiming for certain emotions, it just turns out this way in the end. And then I start thinking about our compositions with pictures. This one talks about this sort of scene. For example, we have a song that in my head feels like the last day of school. It’s not titled like that, there is no clue that this piece is about this theme. It just feels like it. 

ŁŚ: Now I have to ask which one it is!

RG: It’s called number IV but it’s the third one on Kyrie. We have a song called III, but we haven’t added it to the album. It’s complicated.

ŁŚ: How long have you been playing together?

RG: 15 years? 

AL: 12 maybe?

RG: This may interest you. When we started playing together, we wanted to make Swedish cover songs of Kino, the old Russian pop band. But it quickly spiraled out of control and became what you know now.

AL: Yeah, my father was from Russia. So when I was a teenager I felt connected to Russia and Russian culture. So I was working in Moscow for a few weeks and listened to Kino. And then I started to translate the lyrics and that’s how the whole idea of the cover band came about. Even now we have a track called Kino. I'm not ashamed of it, but last years changed a lot. I'm not so proud of my Russian side anymore. It's a little bit strange because, say, 20 years ago, it was something that made me unique in a cool way. So that's why maybe I feel uneasy about it now. And you are from Poland…

ŁŚ: No, don’t worry! I understand that there's politics and there are human beings.

RG: Swedes also conquered Poland, I believe. The good times. (laughs)

ŁŚ: Give us back those treasures you stole! (laughs)

RG: We've lost them. Sorry.

Swedish guests in Poland (1655)

ŁŚ: There is one more connection to Poland in your works. You released a single track about Marie Curie-Skłodowska who was famously Polish. Why did you choose to honor this person in particular?

TR: It was a part of an art project where they had made graphics and texts based on famous people and then asked us if we wanted to make a song about someone. We chose her because I guess we all felt like she was the most interesting person. 

ŁŚ: Her name Curie and your new album Kyrie sound so similar that it's almost impossible that it's just coincidence.

RG: It's unfortunate for us as well, because we have to really specify which song we mean. 

AL: We are so confused every time we have to rehearse now.

TR: And the first album is also just a bunch of numbers. It's incredibly confusing, so we don't know which song we're thinking about.

RG: Yeah, we have nicknames for the songs so we are not lost all the time.

ŁŚ: Like The End of School Day song, right? Is there a reason why you don’t choose titles for your compositions? Or is it just something that you don't like doing?

TR: Maybe because you don't want to influence someone's experience of listening to our tracks with a lame title. 

AL: What I like about instrumental music is that there are no words that tell you what to think or what to feel about a song. It's all in the listener's head. 

ŁŚ: So, let's come to your new album, Kyrie. The first thing you published was actually the live album from a concert that you held in a church, and three years later, which is right now, you released the studio album. Was it planned or maybe it was a coincidence?

AL: It just happened. We had almost everything ready but some of us are really fixed on details. Perfectionists. And since we all have full-time jobs, it took time. At our concerts, we like playing songs before they are released and since we are not so famous no one gets angry because something's not available yet. We can do whatever we want.

So then our friend recorded this gig for us and it was a good recording. We wanted to release it also to say that we're still alive. 

ŁŚ: I hope it doesn’t mean that we will have to wait another six years for the next album?

AL: No. Rasmus has a really good idea.

RG: So we have a new idea about how to record fast. Our major problem is that much of our time goes into relearning what we came up with before. Record fast instead of waiting one and a half years and then trying to rediscover how we did things.

TR: It's not only the production. When you're trying to recreate the feeling that you had when you played 3 years before, you have some sort of emotional picture of what you're trying to play again, but the feeling just isn't the same.

RG: I've heard this being called “the demo disease”. When you work too much on the demo, so then when you're supposed to record it for real, you are just constantly dissatisfied because it doesn't sound like the first version you did.

ŁŚ: With the new album finally released, you are coming to the 5NDREAS Festival in November. So can you tell us what we can expect from your performance at the festival? 

AL: We’ve never played outside of Sweden. It will be fun!

RG: We're going to play our songs and try not to, you know, screw them up. We're not going to play Kyrie in its entirety or we're not going to play only old songs or whatever. It’s gonna be a mix. But we look forward to seeing the other bands play too.

AL: And we really hope that people will enjoy our concert and that they can feel all the feelings, so it's a special moment for them. That would be nice. 🦢

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Star of Heaven will perform at the 5NDREAS Festival on Saturday 28.11.

Save your ticket now (limited availability): https://rausgegangen.de/events/5ndreas-postrock-festival-0/

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What Most You Fear - Proposal (2026)

The piano-driven post-rock from Australia is not a strange concept to me as Tangled Thoughts of Leaving's No Tether is an album I consider one of the best within the entire genre.  What Most You Fear explore similar destination but the jazzy influences traded for the atmospheric and I can't stress enough how good this trade was as the debut album of the Geelong-based band is stunning.

If you think that a combination of piano keys and violin sounds automatically means a brooding and melancholic post-rock soundscape, I have to warn you: although What Most You Fear retain this artful approach to music, the post-rock they create can really bite. Yes, the compositions start as delicate gems with the artsy mood but they soon become energetic, guitar-fueled beasts with interestingly written structures, but also totally untamed character. I just love this combination. A perfect musical rendition of the beauty and the beast concept, making me think of Her Name Is Calla in their most post-rocky times or Hope of the States and their use of piano and violins in otherwise indie rock-paced songs.

Proposal is the band's debut EP/short album and it's really just too short. I feel like the tracks would only gain by adding some additional minutes, but maybe it's just that I like longer pieces. On the other hand, maybe the band really wanted to preserve the energetic vibes the shorter compositions give away. Because when you listen to The sea was rising and we tried to stay or Morning (still burning), you can't NOT feel the thrill of excitement crawling through your back.

Proposal costs 7.5 EUR (12 AUD).

Check: Morning (still burning)

Country: Australia

Genre: piano-driven post-rock

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