ATOMS DON’T DIE. APPARENTLY RIFFS DON’T EITHER.
Two guys. Five tracks. No album yet. And far too many ideas to comfortably fit inside the words “math-rock or post-rock”. Gudewife return with ‘Atoms, Don’t Die’ — and politely make genre classification somebody else’s problem.
Calling Gudewife “newcomers” feels increasingly suspicious.
The North West UK duo — Luke Burrows on guitar and Tom Holmes on drums/bass — still haven’t released a full-length album. Technically, that makes them perfect material for our ‘Introducing Newcomer’ section.
Technically.
Because after ‘In Liminal Space’ in 2020, shows alongside Alpha Male Tea Party, Pleiades and Vordermann, and a steadily growing reputation across the UK underground, Gudewife aren’t exactly waiting around for someone to introduce them anymore. And ‘Atoms, Don’t Die’ – released via Ripcord Records (home of bands like Kusanagi or Partholón…) – makes that distinction even more ridiculous.
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Mathy Post-Rock, But please, do not make us label this thing
Math-rock x Post-rock is probably the easiest starting point. It’s also nowhere near enough.
Across five tracks, Gudewife throw math-rock, prog, jazz, ambient electronics, psychedelia, noise and occasional hardcore violence into the same particle accelerator and see what survives. Apparently: everything.
“Tahrir التحرير”, featuring Palestinian-American poet Hala Alyan, opens with angular guitars, frantic percussion and spoken word floating through controlled chaos. “Millennial Rot”, featuring Pleiades, then introduces hardcore screams into the equation because apparently things weren’t complicated enough already.
From there, “Halcyon Collider” crashes through jazzier passages and psychedelic guitar work, “When Silence Forgets Itself” briefly approaches something resembling conventional post-rock, and “Slow Hound” closes proceedings by pretending to be calm before very much not being calm.
Five tracks. Roughly half an hour. Zero interest in sitting still.
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Nothing Disappears
For all that musical restlessness, ‘Atoms, Don’t Die’ revolves around something much simpler: loss.
Death. Grief. Youth disappearing. Beliefs eroding. Things ending.
The title comes from the idea that matter never really disappears — it changes, decays and disperses into something else. Gudewife translate that beautifully into music: riffs become atmosphere, calm becomes noise, melody becomes aggression, and ideas constantly collapse only to reappear in another form.
Produced by Tom Peters at Trapdoor Studios (A Burial At Sea, Alpha Male Tea Party, Bicurious, Vennart…) and mastered by Stephen Kerrison, the EP gives all those moving parts enough room to breathe without sanding away their volatility.
Because Gudewife sound best when you’re not entirely convinced where the next thirty seconds are going.
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Newcomers* (yes but…)
So yes, we’re introducing Gudewife. With an asterisk.
They have no album. Only two EPs. By the completely arbitrary laws of Score A/V editorial taxonomy, newcomers it is.
But Atoms, Don’t Die doesn’t sound like a band cautiously figuring itself out. It sounds like two musicians who already know exactly what they want to do — which apparently involves math-rock geometry, post-rock scale, jazz instincts, ambient haze, hardcore eruptions and enough rhythmic left turns to make your internal metronome file a formal complaint.
If this is Gudewife before album number one, we’re curious to hear what happens when they actually make one. Until then, ‘Atoms, Don’t Die’ will do very nicely.
