Obsidian Wreath

Fury in mourning. This is the emotional world in which Infant Island’s third album, Obsidian Wreath, wraps itself and its listener. It is an album about trudging through the end of the world: where climate catastrophe, the acceleration of capitalist extractive exploitation, the apathy towards social health which has emerged from the pandemic, and an endless stream of ongoing crises too numerable to be named, constantly haunt the edges of our vision, like a rot that sets in on the borders of being. Obsidian Wreath is an album about the hopelessness of the slow violent decay of the world, about reckoning with a totalizing, impossible condition of reality which never stops confronting you with the question: how do we continue? This is the question which Infant Island contends with throughout this record, a question they meet with fervor, with ferocity, with a determination and clarity marked – sustained, even – by grief. Lyrically, musically, the album shifts between light and darkness, using such tropes and their accompanying affects not in their cliché forms as opposing forces, but as mutually determined states of being which implicate and deterritorialize the Other.