Cork shoegaze quartet Ways of Seeing mediates on trauma, loss and anxiety on sophomore album The Inheritance of Fear, blending personal experience and storytelling with experimental sonics.
Spanning soaring guitar-led anthems to layered productions built on crunchy percussion, sparkling synth embellishments and slinky bass riffs, the captivating collection weaves an immersive tale rooted in experiences and emotions impacted by intergenerational trauma.
From the brooding opening track “Premonition,” reflecting on the fear of death, to the introspective “Godot,” and the examination of the complicated web of legacies on focus track “Last Wave,” the album draws from several texts and writers weaving tales rooted in literature, lived experience and lineage.
Speaking of the album, James O’Donnell says, “Around the time I was starting to write the album, I finished Karl Ove Knausgaard’s autobiographical series My Struggle and was reading The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk. I was also listening to a lot of psychology material from Gabor Maté. There’s a Doireann Ní Ghríofa poem called ‘An Experiment to Engineer an Inheritance of Fear’ It's about how, going back to the Famine, the scent of rotten potatoes has the capabilities to induce fear in us to this day. From spending so much time exploring fear and trauma through those brilliant texts, I thought it would be an interesting concept to thematically shape the album. Some of the songs are explicitly about that, while others hint at it or are linked to me and my own history.”
A weighted and immersive confrontation of the psychological weight of inherited anxieties and how we choose to either overcome or bury past traumas, the album marks a bold and enriching chapter of evolving musical sensibility further cementing Ways of Seeing’s reputation for atmosphere-driven sonics and emotionally expansive songwriting
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