Album review: NOTHING – a short history of decay

NOTHING’s last album proper, 2020’s The Great Dismal, was allegedly inspired by staring at a photo of a black hole. Its belated follow-up finds mainman Domenic Palermo turning his gaze inwards instead, reflecting on the physical and emotional damage incurred during a tumultuous decade-and-change of decadence.

This time, there’s a deeper emotional engagement threaded through NOTHING’s characteristically gloomy preoccupations. The passage of time aches on album opener never come never morning’s recollections of innocence lost, where the nihilistic imagery of toothless coal pictures its narrator ‘Burning at the stake / Laughing at the flames’. Meanwhile, Domenic’s development of a Parkinson’s-like neurological disorder is reckoned with on eponymous closer essential tremors, with the kicker line, ‘I guess the joke’s on me.’

All this comes wrapped in the most diverse collection of music NOTHING have yet compiled. never come never morning and the string-assisted purple strings are imbued with a warm sense of intimacy, while the rain don’t care introduces a subtle country twang to the band’s signature shoegaze. Paying tribute to their antecedents, nerve scales and essential tremors feel like distant relatives of Radiohead’s Fake Plastic Trees and Pavement’s Here respectively.

And then there are the moments of violence. The fierce breakbeats and effects-laden guitar scree of cannibal world and a short history of decay’s title-track conjure an alternative ’90s where My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields made good on his apparent interest in jungle, and toothless coal treads the same balance of the urgent and the ethereal as hip hop experimentalists Dälek.

You can close your eyes to an image of a black hole, but it’s far harder to ignore your own decline. Or, indeed, to turn away from this defiant study of Domenic Palermo’s.

Verdict: 4/5

For fans of: Slow Crush, My Bloody Valentine, DIIV

a short history of decay is out now via Run For Cover.