Vulture Feather released my favourite record of 2023, and they have released my favourite record of 2025. How have they moved on since then? Well, to quote that guy from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure: “everything is different, but the same.”
There have been no grand stretches or leaps forward, little meddling with the band’s sound. And yet there needn’t be: the parameters were always porous, and the overall shape hard to define. Still the clearest comparison is Lungfish (specifically, late period Lungfish), but while Vulture Feather share many of that band’s qualities – mesmeric, emotionally-complex songs calmly trying to divine meaning from workaday phenomena – they are very much their own thing.
Traces of post-punk, psychedelia, art-pop and the less grandiose end of post-rock (Talk Talk, The For Carnation etc.) can all be detected, albeit filtered through the band’s own unique lens and channelled through giant, chiming chords, craning basslines and Colin McCann’s fractured, booming voice. The songs are concise but seem capable of being endless; strangely noble, and conveying both a sense of wholeness and wild, chest-filling hope. It is great music, generally, but perhaps all the greater because hope seems to be in such short supply .