Since 2016, The Sunken Sea have specialised in intricate and expansive art-rock, and with local multi-instrumentalist Dougal James at the helm, they’ve fallen into a clever niche in Melbourne’s music community, thanks to their blend of stormy alt-pop and jazzy soundscapes crossed with imaginative production and gripping social commentary. With their third EP After The Heat on the horizon, today we’ve been treated to a first taste with the enthralling ‘Funeral Pyres’, the group’s first post-2020 release the instantly suggests the forthcoming EP will have a lot of ground to tread over as they tackle the havoc of the past year.

‘Funeral Pyres’ emerges in a similar vein to The Sunken Sea’s latest effort - a two track single released in mid 2020 that relied on the minimal gear Dougal had available to him while he was stuck in lockdown at his parent’s home in Tasmania - with a similarly rambling piano anchoring the track as Dougal’s mournful baritone vocals meander haphazardly through the chords. However, with broader tools at his disposal this time around, the track is able to grow more and more restless as things unravel; first with added vocals courtesy of Tali Mahoney that provide a softer edge alongside Dougal’s anxious delivery, before a drum machine embeds the track with a frenetic pulse and persistent synthesisers and sinewy guitar leads begin to wrestle with the fluctuating soundscape.

Interestingly, as ‘Funeral Pyres’ hits its most climactic moment, the turbulent instrumentation still sits well behind the wall of vocals, creating a sprawling backdrop that blurs beneath the track’s visceral meaning, pulling our focus to take on the weight of Dougal’s exasperated lyrics while the chaos rumbles worryingly in the background. It’s fitting then that Dougal describes the track as “an apocalyptic dream.” Written the day after the 2019 Australian federal election, the track “mourns the destruction of the environment and confronts the baked-in complacency of our atomised lives”, yet simultaneously, “the earnest throbbing heart of this song feels at home in today’s virus-ridden world, where every new lockdown reveals yet again how vital our communities are in keeping us knitted together.”