Last summer, there was a two week stretch where the town I lived in had a thunder storm almost every single night. During a particularly rough few months of various personal issues, it was especially comforting to come home to some sort of natural beauty. I’d sit in my basement bedroom with the window propped open or sit on the front porch for hours and soak in the static-y, humidified air and watch streaks of electricity shoot across the sky. It was around this time that I began to really appreciate Forest Swords‘ Dagger Paths by listening to it in situations like this.

One night in particular, as I was sitting on the front steps watching the storm, a strong gust of wind blew through. By some miracle of physics and nature, the wind sucked all of the dust (or maybe it was pollen or something, I still don’t know) off of a large willow tree down the street. The cloud of dust rolled ominously down the road towards me before it dissipated with another large gust. It’s one of the few times I’ve witnessed some sort of unexplainable weather phenomena and been truly stunned.

Marrying the sort of indescribable, otherworldly sense of awe with a wild array of influences, Matthew Barnes (the man behind the Forest Swords name) continues to develop his unique sound collages into something more refined. “The Weight of Gold” is no less hollow than any of the material on Dagger Paths: the guitars and stuttering tribal drums feel like they’re coming from 100 yards down an unlit hallway, while electronic drones and clipped voices bubble up in between the more pronounced elements. Through the song’s quick five minutes, it becomes progressively harder to discern what’s synthesized or sampled and what’s organic. Whether we understand its origins or not, his new album Engravings is, much like that horrifying cloud of dust, going to cast a large shadow over everything in its path.

Engravings is out August 28th via Tri Angle Records.