Triumvirs (2019)

Triumvirs is Metamyther's debut album, organized around three songs each traveling along three distinct movements, a structure composer Tristan Kneschke will continue exploring in the future. The album's three sagas feel less like pop songs and more like cinematic journeys. Kneschke was inspired in equal parts by three-act narrative and classical music forms, shunning the verse-chorus format, creating songs each propelling into untrodden sonic domains. Triumvirs is glued together with the piano, an instrument adept at cutting through the album's darker timbres and obliquely referencing the album's classical origins. The instrument also holds specific significance to Kneschke as the entrance point for first discovering music as a child.

The searing "Blood Brain Barrier" uses a metaphor for how molecules penetrate the body to describe how music implants in the psyche. The song's blistering buzzsaws tangle with menacing piano lines at the central nervous system's gateway, kicking the album into high gear right from its first moments. A minor key shift signals an uncertain second movement, creating a sense of turbulence and instability as the body attempts to incorporate the foreign entity. The third movement heralds a successful symbiosis with a triumphant and savage synth line that blasts through to the epic finale.

"Ashes Underfoot" soundtracks a dystopian science fiction tale, a nuclear winter foregrounded with ashes from burnt surroundings, falling like snowflakes. Kneschke, raised near an abandoned asbestos factory in America's Rust Belt, drew from his lifelong fascination with abandoned sites and architectural decay as he composed the song. Forceful industrial synths sonically set the stage for the harsh, apocalyptic surroundings. Next, we travel underground to a subterranean catacomb away from nature's harsher elements, a rare moment of tenderness as piano and synth lines are supported by a growling bassline, indicating that danger is never too distant. While the respite is indeed disrupted, the song nevertheless builds towards the stratosphere, an omen to an optimistic end.

Closer "Blast Radius" is Triumvirs' most introspective and the first written with the album in mind. The song tells the story of how we contend with difficult moments in our lives, that we'll be safe as long as we remain outside of the dilemma's blast radius. The first movement finds us in the depths of the complication, but the song's major key points to the individual's resilience. But as the minor key second movement illustrates, problems cannot be solved through pure will. Though some struggle is inevitable, the song's resolution shows that through adversity, we find growth, emerging stronger than before.

"I'd like to get people to think differently about music. I'm most interested in analyzing what happens when we alter aspects of form that we assume are fixed and immutable."