✦ After four years of silence, The Antlers return with Carnage, the first glimpse of their upcoming album Blight. And this return doesn’t whisper — it tolls like a resonating warning bell.
Carnage is not just a song; it’s a metaphor for a violence committed in the shadow of comfort, the kind no one wants to name. Peter Silberman’s fragile yet piercing vocals intertwine with Michael Lerner’s rhythmic strikes, telling of the careless severing of humanity’s bond with nature. Fuzz-stained guitar textures appear like dark blotches scattered across a pastoral landscape — a threat seeping into what is beautiful.
The album’s title, Blight, refers both to the fatal disease in plants and to widespread devastation. Silberman recalls wandering the abandoned trails of upstate New York during its creation, feeling “alone on another planet.” That solitude seeps into the songs; every note carries a quiet lament for an ecosystem being consumed by the modern world’s relentless pace.
Set to release on October 10, 2025, via Transgressive Records, Blight is a nine-track narrative: Consider the Source, Pour, Carnage, Blight, Something in the Air, Deactivate, Calamity, A Great Flood, and They Lost All of Us. Each one touches a different wound carved into nature’s body.
There’s no video for Carnage, but the music itself is vividly visual: dry grass swaying in the wind, a petrified riverbed, a half-finished city. The Antlers place the listener in this silent landscape and whisper the question: “Do you hear this silence too?”
Blight is not only a document of ecological ruin; it’s also a call to slow down, to look, to remember. In the midst of modern alienation, it proves that music can still smell of earth.
