Trilium opens like morning fog on a mirror lake: suspended, infinite, a shimmer of stillness and motion all at once. The album doesn’t start so much as it unfolds, each track bleeding seamlessly into the next, a gentle hypnotism that bypasses the ears and burrows straight into the brainstem. It’s a fluid dream of a record, and for a week now, it’s been my only one.
What stuns me most is how Trillium revives the soul of shoegaze without embalming it in nostalgia. Yes, echoes of Just for a Day and early Verve ripple through, and yes, there's a Spiritualized haze in the spaces between. But Chatham Rise doesn’t mimic. They remember and honor. Their sound is waterlogged but never bloated, submerged like memory rather than drowning. The opener, "Here She Comes,") makes its case with immediacy, not volume. "Souls" and "Soon" arrive later like heartbeats you’d forgotten were yours. Even when they swell, there’s restraint — the mix never screams. It seduces.
This is a band that understands when to strike and when not to. Trillium feels less like an album and more like a landscape, one you pass through without realizing how far you've traveled. “Splinter” disturbs the calm, a quiet reminder that water can soothe, but it also has the power to erode. That’s what this album does: it wears you down softly, without warning.
It’s rare to hear an album that plays like a single breath. But rarer still is one that makes you want to hold that breath forever.
