London-based post-rockers Wildernesses plumb the depths on their new single ‘English Darkness’. Released ahead of the arrival of their debut album on 27 March, the track finds frontman Philip Morris reflecting on his experience as an NHS-approved mental health professional. It proves to be a rich well of inspiration, as the song mutates from an atmosphere of grim foreboding into a desperate, faltering attempt at emotional release.
In contrast to the propulsive throttle of debut single ‘Four Hour Drive’, ‘English Darkness’ is ominous, murky, and almost funereal. The track depicts the psychiatric admission of a young woman with a long history of abuse and mental illness. Crucially, this moment is not presented merely as an emotionally charged episode but also as a mundane bureaucratic incident. Her humanity — all of her suffering, all of her trauma, everything she has ever been and ever will be — is reduced to case notes, routine data about the weather, identification numbers, a simple diagnosis. We are reminded that despite years of mental health “awareness”, those who society deems too difficult or awkward to deal with will be simply processed and filed away.
Although the band are based in London, the song’s sonic landscape feels deeply rooted in Morris’s upbringing on the Humber estuary, in the East Riding of Yorkshire. It is easy to detect in Wildernesses’ England the same earthly horrors found in David Peace’s Red Riding novels. The Yorkshire of both Morris and Peace is populated by ordinary people attempting to navigate a world shaped by a profound darkness operating just below the surface of the day-to-day. Morris grants this darkness a national “English” quality, reminding us that personal suffering is inextricable from the more ambient and universal darkness of society at large. The England of Wildernesses’ music is one characterised by a profound malaise and deep-rooted decay. Definitely a band to keep an eye on.
Written by Matthew Wrafter
