GRAILS have steadily and stubbornly pushed against the staid cliches of instrumental music and towards new sonic frontiers, creating heavily textured albums, stacked deep with epic hooks and inventive instrumentation. GRAILS carry echoes of the classic bands of many genres, but they combine those various styles onto a single record, under one umbrella of musical freedom.
They are the renowned stylistic globetrotters of a fanatical underground record collecting scene, able to hybridize their disparate musical heritage with grace and confidence to build new languages out of genres that were never intended to work together.
GRAILS will be performing live in Europe this fall for the first time since 2019. A new album is in the works for a late 2023 release.
Anches En Maat is the first new album from Grails in over a half-decade – following the masterful Chalice Hymnal in 2017 – and their first album recorded with all members in the studio together since Doomsdayer’s Holiday in 2008. With every Grails album released since Doomsdayer’s Holiday being a sprawling double-album endeavor, Anches En Maat was conceived as a return to the comparatively efficient single LP runtime. With that, Grails set out to craft the same sonically dense world that their longer albums showcased, while trading singular indulgences for live collaborative interplay. The core group of founding members Alex Hall and Emil Amos (Om, Holy Sons) joined Jesse Bates, Ilyas Ahmed, and AE Paterra (Zombi, Majeure) in Atlanta, GA to record Anches En Maat together – a novel event for a band who had become so accustomed to recording separately and then laboring in post-production for months or even years on end. An improbable blend of melted 1980s softcore and daytime soap opera soundtracks, cosmic minimalism, aching Westerns, melancholy electronic pulses, and massive soul-disco strings, Anches En Maat is one of Grails’ most ambitious albums of their 20+ year career.
LINKS:
facebook: https://www.facebook.com/grailsongs/
instagram: https://www.instagram.com/grails_band
bandcamp: https://grails.bandcamp.com/
label: https://www.temporaryresidence.com/
Support act by Pilot Voyager (solo live set)
