Post-rock
Pelagic Records · 16 October 2026
“Burning Fields” runs three minutes and thirty-six seconds and it’s the only one of the seven tracks on “Purity Spiral” where Shy, Low switch the distortion off. It sits fourth, between “Palmistry” and “The Charging, Brazen Bull”, and the job it does on the record is to let everyone breathe: it clears the ground before the band loads up again. The Richmond quintet release it through Pelagic on 16 October, five years after “Snake Behind the Sun”, which came out on 8 October 2021 on the same label. The line-up that recorded it has three guitars — Gregg Peterson, Zak Bryant and Kai Zamora — Drew Storcks on bass and Dylan Partridge on drums.
With three guitars in the band, the density here is deliberate. “Grace” opens with a stretch of clean melody that gives nothing away and then turns over into a dark, crushing passage; “The Bloat”, the first single from the album, holds the weight at a faster pulse and moves into a psychedelic zone where the layers stop being separable. “Palmistry” is the most melodic track and the one the label describes best — a serrated groove that keeps intensifying — and the title track, at nine minutes and twelve seconds, is the most austere thing here. “Greenwood” closes at eight minutes and two seconds, with the slowest tempo and the fewest things sounding at once.
The best idea here is in the wrong place. Pulling the distortion out and leaving the band stripped is the one thing “Purity Spiral” does exactly once, and it’s positioned as a pause between two climbs rather than as material: the other six tracks all move inside the same heavy register, so the second half asks for an attention the first half has already spent. Oli Gonzalez, reviewing it for The Razor’s Edge, suggested cutting a song; it feels more like the album is one song short — one from the “Burning Fields” family.
Rating: 8.0/10
Text by Marçal Bonastre