Sunwraith’s new single, “Golden Sphere,” out 14 August

Sunwraith is an exploration of heavy, atmospheric music, balancing the weight of brutalist percussion with delicate textures of vintage analogue synthesis. The name suggests an entity out of time. Chronos and kairos are central themes that root the band in entropic post-metal with a mind to lyrical prog rock.

The band embraces the aesthetic of retro-futurism — a gritty, isolated, but human cinematic lens. Its sonic lineage traces a line from the dense world-building of Andrei Tarkovsky, to the crush of Cult of Luna and Holy Fawn, and the experimentalism Faith No More and The Mars Volta. The resulting compositions strike out in defiance of a cold, dark, and infinite backdrop.

The debut album was recorded on a farmhouse in rural New Zealand that steeped the performers in a mental model of the films "Stalker," "Solaris," and "Mirror" with recurring imagery of abandoned but sentient spaces, weird physics, and imprinted time. Through down-tuned vintage guitars, ‘70s synths, and contemplative vocals, the songs capture something roughly human but abstracted through phase-decorrelated matrices. Violently pretty, unsettlingly atmospheric, this is Sunwraith.

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