On album #5, Swiss quartet hubris. craft a sterling collection of at-turns atmospheric and hard-hitting instrumental post-rock.
Release date: September 10, 2026 | Independent | Instagram | Facebook | Bandcamp
In the years since Talk Talk‘s masterful Laughing Stock and the band’s subsequent demise in the early 1990s, post-rock has undergone an interesting creative evolution. Slint took similarly lush textures and blended them with their abrasive math rock and post-hardcore tendencies with the same year’s Spiderland, while Tortoise liberally mixed in jazz fusion, dub, and other exotic influences on 1998’s still-impressive TNT. As time went on, post-rock became an umbrella term for dynamic, long-form, often instrumental music that builds pretty tension before exploding in a crescendo of noise – some of this author’s favorites include Caspian, Explosions in the Sky, and the subject of this review, Switzerland’s hubris. (and yes, that’s hubris. in all lowercase, with a period at the end; trying not to end a thought or sentence with this name was HARD).
The group’s previous album, 2023’s The One Above, was an engrossing and highly enjoyable example of modern-day post-rock: four songs totaling 45 minutes, each one jam-packed with that tension-building marathon quality that, in lesser hands, would seem formulaic and predictable but stuck the landing through sheer songwriting quality. On White Shores, they don’t vary things up too much, although it should be noted that this one clocks in at six songs that run five minutes shorter – perhaps by design, they feel more like songs than compositions. When read in sequence, the tracklist says ‘death is just another path’, with the last word split into two parts; the implication being that hubris. offers two different outcomes for the inevitable. Pretentious? Maybe a little, but I’ll take a lofty platitude over a lazy navel-gaze any day.
Longer songs like “death” and “just” hold the listener’s attention even while taking their time developing out. The jangly guitars, the tribal drumming, the layered instrumentation are all there as expected, making the former’s rolling structure – replete with oddly-timed rhythmic accents and wondrous guitar leads – as lovely to behold as they are to hum along to after just one listen, and the latter’s mid-song pivot to chunky riffing and harmonized fret-tapping all the more powerful. The result is like Gojira playing on a giant indie festival stage (sans the vocal bellowing), swallowing the crowd whole before their ambient outros lull it back down to a whisper. On the other side of the coin, “another” is just four minutes long, beginning like an electronica-flecked take on The Beatles‘ “Blackbird” before morphing into a bouncy, full-band groove that wouldn’t be out of place on a latter-day And So I Watch You From Afar record. Both halves of hubris. – the meditative and the danceable – are on full display, both exuberant and irresistible in their own way.
The two-part (or would they be alternate interpretations of the same idea?) “path” is what the band saves its best ideas for. “path I” milks its 12/8 time signature for all the drama it can, with its climactic second half marked by some great rhythmic switch-ups from drummer Léo Juston. “path II” incorporates tremolo guitar lines echoing above nigh-djent rhythm guitar and drums, staccato and jarring but somehow harmonious all the same. As the song barrels toward the finish line in triumphant, Alcest-y glory, the effect is pummeling and uplifting all at once – just the way I like it.
Although post-rock can run fairly generic, hubris. proves on White Shores that there’s still juice in the genre yet. A little electronics here, a little metal there, and above all a healthy dose of heart go a long way toward breathing life into the well-worn style. It’s hard not to smile while the heavenly “is” takes you into the sky with its synth leads and upward guitar bends. Get ready for a gratifying trip into the most idyllic parts of your mind with this one.
