REVIEW: JAGALCHI - You Will Know True Loss

Slam. Poetry. YELLING!

35:27 // July 1, 2025 // Friend Club Records

Music has been imbuing my life with meaning since my early teenage years, and the way it has accomplished this with the most consistency is through the provision of community. Connections formed, both spoken and unspoken, through the melodies and rhythms that populate our planet are some of the most profound that can be experienced in this lifetime. I’m plenty capable of forging bonds with peers through shared interest in other topics, but my longest lasting and most rewarding friendships have always incorporated shared musical interest as a cornerstone of relationship. Time, personal differences, and even physical space can be transcended by the power of this art. It’s how I ended up in a station of life where I began creating music of my own, and it’s how my musical connections led me to discover JAGALCHI, an incredibly promising post-rock outfit whose sophomore effort You Will Know True Loss is rough around the edges, but contains countless diamonds strewn throughout that rough.

Hailing from the vibrant metropolis of Goshen, Indiana (also the childhood home of civil rights advocate Andrew Tate), this multi-talented quintet aims to craft a comforting and all-consuming atmosphere for the listener to call home over the course of You Will Know True Loss’s snappy, yet engrossing 35-minute runtime. This cozy cocoon is threaded together primarily by the group’s airy, spacious, and occasionally stellar instrumentals. The dueling guitar lines of Andrew and Jason Kallicragas are capable of teleporting one’s head straight into the clouds above, but also pack some serious bite, primarily thanks to Jason’s punchy baritone guitar playing. Opener “Our Wandering, Endless” serves as a textbook example of how these two, along with the rest of the collective, succeed in constructing a communal story with their music. Towards the endpoint of the piece, after a gentle triplet vamp has been allowed to air fry for approximately two minutes, everything explodes within the blink of an eye. Accompanied by one of the few instances of sung vocals on the record (a welcome departure, but we’ll get to that later), drummer Tyrus Tucker and horn player Scott Lehman emerge out of the woodwork to propel the track’s dynamics into the next dimension, bolstered by Andrew and Jason coming back down from space to sever the earth’s crust with crushing distorted tones. The more bombastic sections of subsequent track “Twisting Strands” showcase keyboardist Russ Wagner’s ability to bridge the gap between these two musical moods, his melodies almost functioning as a sort of rescue pod to whisk the listener away from the carnage unfolding below.

The record’s loudest, most earth-shattering moments equate to its peaks in quality for two primary reasons, and it’s not just because post-rock climaxes are sick on principle. The first of these is Jordan Wagel’s stellar engineering and mix job that allows the music to breathe easy and controlled, no matter the volume the boys are currently playing at. I can’t accurately recount the amount of post-rock I’ve heard in my life that sounds pristine during the twinkly, pretty sections, only to submerge itself in a layer of unintelligible muck when the volume pedal gets pressed. You Will Know True Loss never acquaints itself with this problem, consistently sounding dialed in, with a particularly impressive drum mix that retains all of the attack of a kit in the very room you’re sitting in, never overpowering the other instruments, nor hiding behind them in moments of aggression. Blake Bickel’s master also deserves kudos for adding a tasteful amount of gloss and loudness to the album’s already brilliant sonic qualities.

Unfortunately, the balls-to-the-wall rockout sections also deliver the most reliably due to their diametric opposition to the album’s greatest weakness; its superfluous spoken word elements. JAGALCHI are far from the first post-rock band to incorporate spoken word vocals and/or narration into their sound, but they regrettably fail to do it on any resonant thematic level. While the prose contains several instances of striking imagery, this is often betrayed by the spoken word performances themselves. The most complimentary adjective I can muster to describe their sound would be “disinterested”, and their ubiquity has the undesirable side effect of distracting from the unwaveringly captivating instrumentals. Sung vocals, such as the aforementioned motif in “Our Wandering, Endless”, don’t seem to have the same negative effects, perhaps because of their somewhat emotionally invested delivery. The album’s highlights, namely bookends “Our Wandering” and closer “Chronarratology”, don’t solely make an impact with their mathy riffs and dynamic peaks and valleys. They also astutely stay as far away from the spoken word as they can (although every track is momentarily plagued with it) and opt not to use it as a crutch. Other tracks, such as “The Gathering Clouds Make Good on Their Threat” are not so lucky, shoving some of the most apathetic narration I’ve heard in the genre front and center for almost a full minute before mercifully getting down to brass tacks.

I’ll get down to brass tacks as well; You Will Know True Loss is a respectable sophomore album, and a worthwhile introduction to JAGALCHI’s sound that I don’t regret listening to whatsoever. It contains a handful of truly jaw-dropping musical passages, and comes highly recommended for any established fan of post-rock, or even that aspiring engineer/audiophile in your life. For an album that this writer only has one true complaint about, it’s a shame that this aspect of it is both so egregious and so inescapable throughout the album’s runtime. That being said, a group of such capable musicians and songwriters cannot truly be tanked by this, and JAGALCHI’s undeniable talent is shining through on the majority of You Will Know True Loss; that is, when it sounds like they want to be there.

6.5/10.

Yo Yo, check out these highlight tracks:

-”Our Wandering, Endless”

-”Chronarratology”