Grails - Anches En Maat [White Ice]

Anches En Maat arrived in 2023 as Grails' first album since Chalice Hymnal, and it finds the Portland veterans chasing ideas they had kept on the back burner for twenty years. The result is their most 1980s-inspired record: sleek, nocturnal and cinematic, with the band's psychedelic roots still running underneath.

Drummer and multi-instrumentalist Emil Amos has said that after two decades together there were sounds the band had always wanted to try but never had room for, and this album is where they finally let them in. "Sad & Illegal" opens with neon-lit melancholy, "Viktor's Night Map" plays like a lost thriller score, "Sisters Of Bilitis" calls back to the Deep Politics era, and the title track closes the album with a slow, glowing fade.

It is a late-career high point and proof that Grails still sound like no one else.

Pressed on limited White Ice vinyl by Temporary Residence.