If a band sounds like they're just too cool to care, the lever gets unceremoniously pulled. Sputtering their lyrics a bit too lackadaisically? Playing with too much affected shoddiness? Sauntering, sun-soaked and sleepy, through their songs? Creak, thwomp, thud, they're gone. Not caring is not cool. Caring about the purest possible form of human expression? That’s cool.
Pavement, the one true gods of slacker rock, had a workaround for this, of course. The golden wit of Stephen Malkmus was more than enough to keep them on firm ground, but many other bands since have fallen through, never to be heard from (in my house) again. Speaking of which, I first encountered Guillem Peeters as the disaffected drummer for Pavement parroters bar italia; he played on their 2023 breakthrough , but I don’t hold that against him. As for his first two albums under the name of Eterna, 2023's and 2025's , well, they had a bunch of cool ideas and interesting palettes of sound meshed with home-recorded demos, but they didn't pass the slacker rock style test: creak, thwomp, thud, times two.
On his new album , though, the Barcelona-born, London-based multi-instrumentalist feels as though he cares an awful lot. Where before there was only spur-of-the-moment collaging, here the evidence suggests a more carefully crafted approach, with some whimsical whittling down too. Severing all ties with the tiresomely scruffy and oblique, he’s gone deeper into the post-rock underworld, where “chill vibes” have grown into fully-fledged, hazy expanses of sound, and what was once just “kinda relaxing” has transcended to “blissed out.”
There’s a magical passage on “Kyrie”, the second track on where a distant drum loop scuttles in the distance, a skeletal guitar phases in and out of time with it, at the very top of the mix, and both parts match the other’s meander, searching, searching, searching. Then, 34 seconds in, Peeters discovers the secret chord. He splays it across the fretboard, synth textures in the background, the faraway drums meet the rest of the sounds in the middle, and everything clicks ever so suddenly into place. It sounds like an artist discovering a whole new world in real time, then taking time to really explore it and leave his mark all over. Peeters tags its winding instrumental passages – broken-sounding, tactile guitar solos are his spray paint – the way that 10 Foot might tag all the railway bridges on your daily commute (with love, gumption, and zeal).
If the earlier Eterna albums found Peeters muddy from frolicking too much in the post-punk pastures of London present – a little more “solo album from the bar italia drummer” than necessary, if you ask me – captures him lost endlessly in the fields of English post-rock past. The magnificent “Shadowcasting for the Villain” shimmers like the save data from XTC’s corrupted by taut, David Pajo-like guitar spidercraft, while the pastoral closer “Rex” swirls endlessly with distant vocal harmonies obscured by dubby minimalist percussion and stuttering guitars. Moody trip hop circuitbreaker “Gum”, meanwhile, sounds like the yin to Tara Clerkin Trio’s yang, wild and wilting, while the album’s tenser moments, copecore brawler “Push” and slowcore bawler “Ten Lone Stars”, mix direct songwriting with Peeters’ emotionally rich playing.
In the “less reverb is more reverb” strategy, the sublime and pastoral beauty, and the patient buildups, you can hear more than just a little Talk Talk here. Like Mark Hollis and co., Peeters aims to craft a deeply surreal world through his music and pulls it off in style. It may feel hazy, liminal, and dare I say ethereal, also feels so real, like somewhere you can live, breathe, and maybe grow old if you are so lucky. There’s the urge to call it a modernisation of the first wave post-rock palette (think Bark Psychosis on the Elizabeth Line), but while it does sound very current, the cloudy hypnagogia surrounding it all signals something more. This is music that stops time, or stands outside of it completely. Eternal, one could say, but with no L in sight.
Just one year on from , Peeters has swiftly metamorphosed: the bright-eyed slackerpillar is now a brilliant blue butterfly, and I don’t think I’ll be needing that trapdoor anymore.