Post-rock
Grabaciones Strelka · 9 October 2026
“Rapier”, six fifty-two, opens the record with the old blueprint and one new thing inside it. The blueprint is the usual one: a monolithic track with a long development, two guitars answering each other and a build that never comes apart. The new thing is the synths, which are the floor here and not the furniture, and the band make no secret of it. The track, they say, “condenses the compositional philosophy of Toundra’s early years” while giving the keyboards “a far more prominent role”. The man who brought them in is Jorge García, the guitarist who replaced Esteban Girón and who comes out of Adrift, Loma Baja and El Páramo.
The best decision on the album is the smallest one. On “Sizigia”, five fifteen, the snare’s strainer is left open for most of the track, so every hit rings like a timbale and the drums let the pulse vibrate instead of marking it; when it finally closes, in the last stretch, the song doesn’t speed up and still sounds as though it had. It is the slowest of the seven and the closest to textbook post-rock, and its restraint comes from a screw on the snare rather than from any silence.
“Costa Roja”, five thirty-two, is the track that justifies the whole operation. It rests on a drum machine, a device the band had only touched on before with “Mojave”, on “Vortex”, and it is also the shortest, the brightest and the least like anything on “Hex”. “30960”, four twenty-four, goes the other way: it starts high and stays there, and the title nods to the lighthouse at Sant Feliu de Guíxols, the town where Ultramarinos Costa Brava is, where Santi García mixed the record and Víctor García mastered it. “Uniforme”, five twelve, closes with delicate guitars and ends up flattening everything, timbales accelerating through the final minutes.
What doesn’t quite add up is the proportion. If the leap on this record is analogue electronics — and the band, their new guitarist and everyone who has written about it say it is — then it arrives whole on one track out of seven and in passages of the other six, where the two-guitar architecture we already knew takes charge again. Self-releasing was supposed to give them the freedom to explore a looser sound, and “Siete” has used it to sharpen what they already did well more than to open anything up.
There is one thing, though, that this band had never been heard doing: sounding comfortable right after nearly losing everything. This is their seventh album, four years and eight months after “Hex”, without the founder who wrote their guitar parts and without InsideOut, and with Víctor García-Tapia, the other founder, the one who left in 2013, guesting on it thirteen years later.
Rating: 8.0/10
Text by Marçal Bonastre