REVIEW: The Antlers - Blight

It will come back around

45:05 // October 10, 2025 // Transgressive Records

The Antlers might, in the popular consciousness of music fans, always be slumbering in the long shadow cast by their melancholic masterpiece Hospice, but for me, Peter Silberman’s long-running project has far more to offer. Indeed, they’ve never made the same album twice, and all have considerable merit. After a long hiatus, 2021’s Green to Gold was yet another proof of this, its sleepy beauty melding warm Americana touches with a foundation of muted indie rock to perfectly encapsulate the summer-into-autumn focus.

With Blight marking The Antlers’ second post-hiatus LP, there’s clear influence from Green to Gold despite the two albums being far from twins. The records share subdued dynamics and lazy tempos, but the atmosphere this time around is downright wintry, if no less abstractly beautiful. Lyrically, Silberman here adopts the loving ode to seasonal change which is the masterwork Green to Gold title track and warps it into a fixation of the dark sides of human impact on flora and fauna.

The latest full-length summons up visions of Silberman in the flickering dimness of a candlelit room, singing his depressing ruminations to me and me alone. The delicate arrangements of these nine tracks encourage that feeling - they’re often so wispy as to be almost translucent, allowing the focus to be solely on the singer’s angelic and emotive voice. These songs are undeniably beautiful, feeling as sublime and untouched as a field of snow before it’s disturbed by the first boot, but remain illusive, ghostly and otherworldly in much the same manner as Sigur Ros at their finest.

Gorgeous as it is, Blight is a challenging listen. This isn’t only because of its minimalistic nature and plodding pacing, but also due to its grim subject matter. Silberman’s lyricism here is thoughtful and manages to keep its bitterness in check - the latter almost disturbingly so, as if all the damage, and the implied coming apocalypse, is such a fait accompli that acceptance is the only option, but all he sings of, in eloquent phrasing, is profoundly moving. Opener “Consider the Source” might be the album’s most sprawling statement of intent, but tracks like “Carnage”, with its horrifying imagery, the ominous “Something in the Air”, and the shuffling “Calamity”, with its murmured phrasing of “sure we’ll get this right next time”, all resonate deeply.

The album’s closing wind-down is likely to prove the most debated aspect of Blight. It’s evident that Silberman means for the final sequence of three shorter tracks - the aforementioned “Calamity”, the funereal hymnal “A Great Flood”, and the calm instrumental “They Lost All of Us” to artistically symbolize some final catastrophe and the ensuing next era of a post-human world - they’re very pretty, and their slow progressions suggest a glacial feeling, a fitting sense of elemental forces reclaiming the land. I can both appreciate the intent, and also rather dislike it - some part of me cries out for a final statement of human passion, even a call to action. Perhaps it’s the feeling of emotional distance from the subject which bothers me - the record feels like a dismayingly calm analysis of the savage costs of the sum total of all human achievement, followed by what is essentially a fadeout, a quiet departure, ending in a coda to our species’ time. This isn’t to say that the album as a whole doesn’t remain immensely touching, though, and it’s clear that these themes of environmental degradation are near to Silberman’s heart - the results are stunning and often truly wrenching. Perhaps this concluding punch to the gut, which shows us where we’re heading, without even putting up much of a fight, is just what the proverbial doctor ordered in order to shake us out of our stupor, change our behavior, and alter course before reaping the results of colossal folly. But I don’t have to like it - I’m only human after all. Consider the source.

8.0/10