distance
so as not to forget
Review by Craig Leahy
Alright man here we are, on the free tier of Wix, the lowest form of communication on the internet. The home of people who truly cannot bear to pay another cent of Wix domain fees and have finally given up on caring if people think he’s poor because of the domain name, whatever. Honestly man I was hoping to have transitioned this site into something new by now, I kinda like the idea of following what everyone else is doing, but like one generation behind - So while everyone was sitting there listening to podcasts, I was here typing into the void. Now that podcasts are a YouTube thing, I was hoping to have this be a podcast by now, it’ll likely happen, but it won’t happen until I can assure some consistency, and being surrounded by people as lazy as the NZ metal scene, it might be a while.
So while I figure out what Gone for Smokes looks like over the coming months I’d planned on not writing anything, until recently when Sam from distance slid into my DMs with a preview copy of the upcoming secret release they have planned, I jumped at the chance to get a little bitchy on the internet, as distance are a band I've been interested in their progression for a WHILE now. It’s real funny that I was given this album too, given the genre. I honestly thought I'd been pretty open with my opinion on post-rock, but apparently not. So first thing I’ll say is, man I really don’t like post rock at all aye. It’s kinda fuckin’ lame and even you, the 34 year old post-rock guy at the party, is well aware of it.
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Oh like, just a heads up before we talk about this album, they do that fuckin’ zoomer thing of not putting capital letters in any of their song titles or band name, so if anyone wants to get at me for my grammar, fuck off go harass Sam for his artistic choices and the entire zoomer generation for choosing this hill to die on for some reason.
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Let me paint a picture, in your mind palace if you will;
The year is 2007, you’ve had a crush on the same baddie for like 5 years now, Antionette. You’ve come close to expressing how you feel about Antionette on multiple occasions, you’ve been at the same parties, go to the same school, you got a part time job at the same KFC she works at so she can see how strong you are lifting those chicken racks, but you never seem to be able to pull the trigger and tell her how you feel. I guess half out of fear that she will reject you, but mostly out of the absolute fact that she is smarter than you, prettier than you, her friends see you in the bike sheds and laugh at your shit Haro BMX that still has the shiniest pegs on it because you’ve got no mates to dub on them and you’re sure as fuck not dexterous enough to do a grind with them.
So one day you wake up, it’s a Friday, you think to yourself man fuck this I’m going to talk to her. You chuck on your best Killswitch Engage tee, grab your Haro and head off to school. The day goes by, you see her a few times, she gives you a passing glance, her friends laugh at you because no one likes Killswitch Engage, no, not even in 2007. It doesn’t falter you one bit, you know what you’re going to do today, you’re gonna tell Antoinette that she bad as fuck and you want to be her boyfriend. The day goes on, you spill half a Fanta on your shirt, Grape Fanta too because you’re a fucking loser, you fuck up a project so bad in Woodwork that the teacher calls you out in front of the whole class for your weak ass wrists, on the way to the bike shed you trip up into a line of bikes that startles the whole group of your peers all trying to get their bikes and fuck off before the bus traffic starts. None of this matters, you see Antoinette standing against the fence waiting for her asshole friends.
This is your chance.
You grab your Haro, hoon off to meet her. On the way there you see a ledge, it’s quite small so you think you can bunnyhop up onto it. You get a tonne of speed, and just as the moment hits, you go to hop, realise you don’t have an athletic bone in your shit underdeveloped body and kind of just flop to the side and crash out on the footpath. All while Antionette is walking away, unaware of even your attempt at impressing her. God what a fuckin’ day.
That’s okay though, you head home with the intention of finding her on that new site Facebook and sending her a message. Once you’re at home, you jump on your computer, check your Kazaa download queue to see what’s finished, and you see the new Explosions in the Sky album has finally downloaded. It’s called ‘All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone’, you decide to put it on. You downloaded it because the name sounded hard, but had no idea what to expect. You’re greeted with a warm, ambient texture, a layering of guitars that you’ve never quite heard anything like before, followed by an uplifting, groovy and poignant hook that gets you feeling a way about music that you’d never felt before. What was this feeling?
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It was introspection.
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This music had opened up a pathway in your brain that you didn’t know existed, it allowed you to direct your thinking inward, be alone with your thoughts and face emotions that you’ve never really known how to face before. This was it man, this is what you were going to send to Antoinette, this is how she will know you that you are intelligent, emotional, thoughtful and a bit of a hipster (girls love hipsters I’m told). You click onto YouTube to find a link to the track ‘Birth and Death of the Day’ you fire up Facebook and you send the link over with a small message saying ‘I thought you might like this’. About an hour goes by and she finally opens the message, you see the ‘seen’ notification and your heart stops. 5 minutes go by, still no reply, 6 minutes, 7 minutes, still nothing. You’ve been sitting staring at the chat function for 15 minutes at this point, when it occurs to you, Antoinette doesn’t care about what you’ve just sent. She’s not going to listen to your stupid song and she doesn’t care about your ambitions of a fucking BMX career, she knows you played Matt Hoffman’s Pro BMX on PS1 like everyone else but took it too seriously and based your whole ass personality around it, god you’re so stupid, why don’t - Wait, she’s typing. She types for what feels like forever, then the typing stops. Your heart sinks and you decide to walk away. As you’re walking away you hear ‘DING’, she’d replied. You run back to the computer, sit down in the dining chair you have for a computer chair because your mum refuses to buy you another one after how many cleans it took to clean the last one, you look at the chat notification,
“This is pretty gay bro”
And she’s right, it was pretty fucking gay bro, Explosions in the Sky fucking sucks and you’ve convinced yourself the band is so good your life is different now. No, it’s pseudo-intellectual asshole music for fucking nerds, and now Antoinette knows you’re a fucking dork.
How do you feel reading that? You know what, don’t answer me, if you’ve clicked on a review for the new distance album there’s a high chance that exact thing has happened to you, you’ve probably tried expressing your emotions with a fucking delay pedal more than once before in your life, and you know what? That’s fine, I forgive you, as long as you aren’t still using ‘gay’ as an insult in the big ’25, then we’re good, kind of. But before we move on, I do need to stress one thing in all sincerity and all jokes aside,
Every single person that actively listens to Explosion in the Sky is a fucking dweeb.
This whole thing brings me to what I said earlier, that I hate post-rock. Actually, that's not fair. While this is a mostly true statement, there’s so much a GOOD post-rock band can offer that they just never seem to capitalise on. Those lush textures I mentioned, the emotive and expressive nature of the composition can be straight up fucking breathtaking man, the introspection I mentioned? That’s fuckin’ real man, I’ve HAD those moments. First time I heard Skinny Fists by Godspeed! You Black Emperor, I sat on my floor in silence contemplating decisions I’d made in my past, reflecting on interactions I’d had with people that I regret, seriously man the shit is powerful when it’s masterfully composed. My problem is that most post-rock bands fall into the camp of playing a nice melody for a bit, then woah wait there’s a third guitar and he’s playing a heavy texture, wow now there’s a tom build up then BAM silence while a lone guitar plays the same melody with a brittle guitar tone until POW the whole band is heavy. The composition isn’t there, the expressive nature of the melodies aren’t present, the melody exists to be pleasant. Which I guess is fine in a fucking elevator, but not on the streets, and the streets are where you’ll find me, son.
This brings me to distance though man,
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distance is a band I’d been seeing the name of for what felt like years before I finally checked them out, I knew it was post-rock so just kind of skipped. One day I was out back of Valhalla talking to national band slut, Levi Sheehan. He told me he was drumming in a post-rock band and it was my fault for introducing the genre to him. See when I first met Levi he was 17 years old and a bunch of him and his cummy ass slam kid friends had moved to Wellington and out of desperation to pay my rent, I stupidly let one of them move in with me, irreparably fucking up my life for the next 3 years. This meant fucking WEEKLY I had between 5-10 of the most stinky-armpit little cargo short wearing dickheads around me telling me if I hadn’t heard the new Slamceretops album I should kill myself or some whack shit. I swear to god one weekend we were all drunk and one of these little cunts called my mum at 5am off my phone, left a voicemail for her saying ‘Craig has a child now don’t call him’ - Then my fucking mum called me the next day to find out if she had a god damned grandchild.
Fuck actually maybe these kids were cool as hell, that’s pretty funny.
Anyway, Levi (or Shitty Little Dickhead as me and my mature, adult friends used to call him) was one of the chiller ones who was clearly honed in on his craft, he ended up being the hottest commodity in all of NZ metal, playing drums in Organectomy, distance and guitar in Utilize the Remains. Anyway, he must have heard me playing MONO or something and now blames me for his life choices, which is especially funny because I actively liked post-rock for maybe a year in my 20's before mostly falling off the genre, now he's a guy in his thirties actively making music for people to play in the background of LAN parties. Anyway, because I generally enjoy Levi’s projects I went home and checked it out, and you know what, it was cool. Little Jakob-worshipy for my taste, but the bones were there, I liked it. A couple years later I get introduced to Sam out back of a Glassblower show, had no idea who he was at the time, but Levi let me know he’s the guy that basically IS distance. He writes all the material, sets the direction and does all the leg-work for what he wants to present as a finished product. I get to talking to Sam and he’s straight up fuckin’ lovely. Like how often do you meet someone at fucking Valhalla that you would consider lovely? Literally never, the nicest thing anyone has ever done at Valhalla is spit at your feet instead of in your mouth. But man this guy ruled. Few months later he slides into my Instagram DMs with a preview copy of ‘so as not to forget’, which I graciously accepted and started planning a review.
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Right out of the gate, 'so as not to forget’ is a monumental step up from their debut album ‘Everything in Exchange for Nothing’, the production feels bigger, the compositions are more interesting, there’s more to the dynamics aside from ‘quiet part, build up, loud part’ by the end of the first track ‘dunharrow’ there was a genuine excitement to see where this album goes. ‘dunharrow’ is such a good example of distance growing up a bit, does is sound like other post-rock bands? Yea of course, it’s still post-rock. But it's distance's compositions stand out to be as deliberate and intentional, it has an emotion it is trying to portray and feels like it meticulously trying to bring it out of me. From the bass modulation around the intro guitar riff to the hi-hat dynamics of the drums, everything feels like it has intention and purpose, and I fucking love this quality in music.
After ‘dunharrow’ reaches its crescendo, it fades out with an industrial texture and blends seamlessly into the follow-up ‘the red cloud’, which bursts with an intensity that is always welcome in such a subdued genre, and honest to god by the third track ‘filament’ it really hit me that this album is scratching an itch I’ve been desperate to have scratched in recent times. ‘so as not to forget’ is intended to be digested as a single piece of music, sure they’re all individual songs and maybe this wasn’t the intention at all, but the way they are interwoven, with extended ambience, interludes and textural interplay leads me down the path of listening to this whole thing in one go. Without going into too much of an old man rant, it like brings a proper smile to my face even writing that. I got asked in an interview recently what my thoughts on how streaming services have impacted music, and honestly man having literally every Self Defense Family EP at my fingertips is amazing but as of a few years ago, it really killed the idea of an album, all of a sudden people only wanted a single, and some fucking terrorist at Spotify is the one who determines what type of single will perform well in the algorithm, so now artists are fucking incentivised to express themselves in a formulaic way determined by some fucking billionaire who has never had an ounce of artistic integrity in his life. Jesus, and in 2025, people don’t even care about the single anymore, they want a bangin’ 25 second loop for their reel or their TikTok. The whole model is anti-art, anti-expression and has spent the last 10 years completely flattening the culture. So when an album like ‘so as not to forget’ drops and it seems explicitly intended to be digested in a single sitting, and a single song is made better in the context of a wider piece of art, then motherfucker, you should pay attention. I’m so sorry, that’s the purest form of what we all strive to do and I believe distance have achieved it on ‘so as not to forget’. There’s no track I would just pop on by itself (sorry, one, but I will talk about that soon) instead I would chuck this whole album on, and you better too cunt. I swear to god if I see the streaming numbers for ‘dunharrow’ be 50x higher than all the other tracks I’m going to have a fucking meltdown on distance’s behalf.
I mentioned there was one track on this thing that I would play in isolation, let me talk about that for a minute;
I’d like to go back to the statement I made earlier about good post-rock enabling a line of introspection that can be really powerful. Just stay with me a second, this is going to get a bit mushy. Generally when I write these reviews I do a few passive listens, then sit down and start typing my thoughts with the album on in the background. But there’s one particular track on this thing that really dug its way inside of me, it’s called ‘gone in the instant of becoming'. I was working from home when I did my first listen, the track started, was pleasant enough, but not long into the song Sam begun singing, the album had been entirely instrumental to this point so it kind of caught me off guard, I stopped what I was doing and just sat in my home office and stared at my speakers. Then kept staring, for like fucking ages. The song was delicate, poignant, had an air of vulnerability to it that really struck me. I sat there motionless just… digesting. The track got me thinking about everything good that is happening in my life, it got me thinking about tough times that had come before, having a history of mental health challenges, addictions, ultra fuckin’ lows and then onto thinking about the people who helped me through those times, it got me thinking about how much it means to be to be surrounded by the most loving family I could ask for. it made me think about my daughter, who was down the road at daycare at the time, I started wondering if she was having a good day, wondering who she was playing with and what she had for lunch and if she enjoyed it. I thought about my fiancé and how lucky I am to be marrying her in February next year, I had an overwhelming feeling of gratitude for everyone in my life that honestly at times I feel like I don’t deserve in the slightest, I started wondering if maybe I do deserve it and I’m always being a little bit too hard on myself? I started thinking about my values as a father, my worth as a soon-to-be husband, do I tell my friends I love and appreciate them enough? Honestly man, it was overwhelming in the best way possible, and before I even considered moving on, I’d listened to the song 3 times in a row just to soak in as much of that moment as I possibly could. For distance, I hope they understand what they’ve been able to capture on tape. This is a fucking special track man, and with it distance have been able to capture something that not a lot of artists do, and that is capture a fleeting moment of authenticity to share with the community. So often when you talk to people about why they like certain kinds of music, the reply is essentially ‘OH BRO THE RIFFS BRO FUCK YEA YOU HEAR THAT SHIT’ and like, yes Christchurch slam-kids I hear that fucking riff okay, we’ve all heard that fucking riff, but to be able to capture this fuckin’ like, transient moment of vulnerability that Sam was having and be able to connect with their audience like that is just fucking amazing man, all the respect in the world to the boys for this.
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That was the exact moment I’d been waiting for from a post-rock album in over 10 years. I messaged some friends after the song finished and told them about a post-rock album I was reviewing (I was sworn to secrecy around not ruining the sneak drop distance was planning for this album) and that hadn’t felt this way since Godspeed! You Black Emperor released ‘Hallelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!’ In 2012. That’s pretty fucking special man, and regardless of how I’ve previously felt about post-rock, truly man, I think I’ll always remember hearing this fuckin’ song for the first time the same way I felt about hearing ‘Mladic’ for the first time, because it got me to feel something, it got me to feel A LOT.
True story, after I finished listening to ‘gone in the instant of becoming’ 3 times, I took my headphones off for a second, only to hear my dog, Patrice barking HARD. Patrice is a 27kg British Bulldog that can’t get down stairs by himself because he’s an abomination of god with a body made of pure bullshit. Went upstairs to see what was going on, turns out he just wanted some snacks, but he’s also on a diet because he got so fuckin’ fat from the snacks I’d been giving him for the last year, so I just kinda just picked him up under his belly and carried him downstairs with his legs flailing in front of him, he also happens to hate downstairs because the bath is down here, which led to him getting so scared about going down the stairs that he pissed on the wall the entire way down, Fucking STRAIGHT UP happened dude, line of piss on my damn wall next to the stairs. Moral of that story?
If you’re not listening to distance at all times, your life will fall apart and you’ll inevitably get piss on the walls.
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Just look at the little cunt, god it's hard to be mad at him.
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I’m hyper-aware this review has been less banter-filled than most of my other reviews, and man, this album has just got me on some metro-bullshit or something, I’m like fuckin’ happier while listening to it haha. Dude, that feeling combined with the fact that Levi was probably wearing cargo shorts while recording his parts is so fucking conflicting, I bet the shorts were stinky too. Fuck you Levi.
I’ve been talking about how this album is best enjoyed as a full experience as opposed to individual songs, but for you TikTok losers out there, if there’s just one song you check out and your weak as self-esteem can’t handle the pressure of listening to ‘gone in the instant of becoming’ out of fear of realising no one likes your same 3 ‘one time at Valhalla’ stories, do yourself a favour and check out the track ‘…and salt the earth behind you’ for a really good example of a post-rock song that is perfectly written, from mood and atmosphere, to structure and hooks, this thing is a fucking belter. As the last track on the album, it feels like it has a job to really step up the whole mood and leave people wanting more and fuck me does it ever. The lush outro builds to eventually include a saxophone on it that you just know Sam has fucked to before. The mood slowly dissipates into emptiness before eventually erupting in a blast beat section (because of course there’s a blast beat section on any release involving anyone from fucking Christchurch). This blast beat section holds the tension for just long enough to really serve you the pay off of a wall of sound half time assault to remind you that distance have just clocked the post-rock game, again, in 2025.
Straight up when I was done with this album, I had this overwhelming sense of dread that I'd missed out on 10 years worth of amazing post-rock material after falling out of love with the genre. If distance was able to put out this masterpiece within the 'rules' of a genre I admittedly don't enjoy, maybe it was just some weird grudge I'd been holding against the genre for no real reason. I excitedly went back through a lot of the heavy hitting post-rock releases to understand what I'd been missing out on...
…and the answer is fucking nothing, post-rock still sucks.
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distance's new album can be pre-ordered from their bandcamp page HERE and releases TOMORROW.