Ilyas Ahmed

Longtime RSTB favorite Ilyas Ahmed was last heard carving silence and static with Jefre Cantu-Ledesma in 2021, but he’s returned for a hauntingly stark new album this year. The album, a masterwork in loneliness, eschews much of the haze of Ahmed’s past, diving into the skeletal sonic deserts populated by Loren Connors. The record forgoes lyrics in favor of building aural tapestries of dread, distance, and desperation. The album opens with just a touch of static swirling among the drone and winds — a last signal from the dying modern world before the listener is left among the ruins with only reflection and regret for companions. Though the album is desolate, that’s not to say that its not also beautiful. Ahmed’s guitar has never sounded more assured and patient. The phrases are turned over in the speakers like sea glass, catching bits of light that seep through the cloud cover.

The songs are built like bone sculptures, bleached clean by the dessert sun. They carry an aura of warning, but back away, and the shape is more beautiful than barbarous. The overt anxiety breaks a bit as the record hits the midpoint “Little Devil,” letting an an electronic pulse carry the song with a detached air, sliding towards a feeling that’s half apathy and half ecstasy. The album peaks with the lengthy, “A Dream of Something,” a track that hangs on frozen air, circling the listener with crystalline synths and the slow pace of Ahmed’s stringwork. There have been several albums in the last few years that, naturally, have tried to capture the core of isolation, the kernel of what it means to be lonesome. Few have come close to what Ahmed has achieved here, an album that’s laced with ache that shimmers like a beacon in the dark.

Support the artist. Buy it HERE.