Tenue – Arcos, Bó​vedas, Pó​rticos

01. Inquietude
02. Letargo
03. Distracción
04. Enfoque
05. Unión

After completing the monumental task of having a one-track screamo album, Tenue expand both the tracklist and the sound.

Territorios‘s single track gimmick was what initially grabbed my attention towards the band, as one-track albums are usually more of a fit for genres already prone to long songs like prog metal or doom metal. Hardcore punk and its various subgenres are more of the type that can have songs whose runtime can get counted in the seconds at their most extreme, but very rarely go over the normal song mark, so seeing a band pull out a 29-minute long screamo track was obviously quite an achievement. The closest I could think of was Pig Destroyer’s Natasha, and both achieved it by basically injecting something more fit for the long form. For Pig Destroyer it was sludge and drone. For Tenue it was post-rock and blackgaze.

Even with its gimmick, Territorios was more impressive for how well it achieved its result, and Arcos, Bó​vedas, Pó​rticos does away with that gimmick. However there’s a lot that’s shared in how the songwriting operates because of how the focus is still on longer runtimes. Divided into five tracks, each in the 5-10 minutes range in runtime, Arcos, Bó​vedas, Pó​rticos is still more long-form than usual for an album whose main tag is a hardcore subgenre. But the screamo and neocrust sounds have more of a say in the style rather than the structure of the album. Screamo vocals and crust riffing aside, Arcos, Bó​vedas, Pó​rticos feels closer to a post/blackgaze album.

Mixes of crust/screamo and post-black are quite abound, and you could place Tenue anywhere between Deafheaven, Svalbard, and fellow countryfolks Svdestada, but now that the focus is entirely on the band’s sound rather than the album’s structure, some of its elements come to the forefront. There’s some slight orchestral touches this time around, mostly in the term of horns, and that blends really well with the post-rock-ish tremolo picking to weigh on the triumphant side of the scale in the band’s sound. The mellow side, especially in the guitar melodies, can have a strong atmospheric black metal or post-metal feeling at times, and at its chunkiest, the mix of very audible bass and blast beats along with the rest of the instrumentation can feel like it overwhelms the vocals in a way that feels intentional to how suffocating the album’s emotional resonance aims to be. Harsh vocals like this are often quite unintelligible anyway, but adding the language barrier from the Galician somehow makes it even more potent emotionally.

Between Tenue other acts like Svdestada, Viva Belgrado, Boneflower, Crossed, Ànteros, and Altair, it seems like Spain is going through an explosion of transformative screamo acts to watch out for. And even if Arcos, Bó​vedas, Pó​rticos might feel like the least overtly punk of their albums, it uses a wide arsenal for its emotional resonance.

Written on 15.11.2024 by RaduP Doesn’t matter that much to me if you agree with me, as long as you checked the album out.

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