Fainting Dreams take their most biting form yet in an attempt to wake us the fuck up on The Silence of Birds That Rarely Sing.
Release date: April 6, 2026 | Softseed Music/Zegema Beach Records | Instagram | Bandcamp
Once again a full-fledged ensemble after core member Elle Reynolds took a very affecting, personal detour with the Fainting Dreams name for its last project mere months ago, The Silence of Birds That Rarely Sing is the epitome of actuation for our age. Reynolds has said it’s a deliberate act to make all Fainting Dreams projects separate and different from others. Where before their name was indicative of the atmosphere and mood of the music, like a hallucination or near-death experience that elicits a euphoria rather than taxing fear or pain, this new three-song EP – which is more like one long track – is immense, weighted, and even acidic.
I could spend time comparing what the quartet achieve on here to other bands, but it’s just best listened to if you like light screamo, gazy atmo, even a post-metal flare all using ethereal rock as a base. Beneath it all, there is the Fainting Dreams we’ve come to know throughout the years, but this EP still feels so different from the past, probably because we’re not living in that past anymore.
There’s a lot of momentum to The Silence of Birds That Rarely Sing. “I” feels like a portent of doom (musically and emotionally) and if it is, then “II” is the arrival of it. It’s more macro level than we’re perhaps used to with all the personal stories that envelope Fainting Dreams‘ music, but these are personal affairs as well even if you don’t recognize them as such. There’s lyrical references to medical gaslighting and negligence, insurance claim denials, climate catastrophe, homelessness crises, and hospitals being bombed and kids dying in one of several mass killing events and genocides going on around the world (the mere fact I have to phrase it that way is the biggest moral and ethical failing in human history).
The band have never been one to apply a coat of sugar with any of its thematic anchors and this is no exception. It ends up giving the EP an immediacy, especially in the wake of the state-approved, Nancy Pelosi-cosigned, no-demands-having No Kings protests which you can’t convince me aren’t at least neoliberal psyop adjacent. These are issues this band clearly care about and platforms them in an effort not to signal virtues (not that I would mind that either), but keep the eye (and ear) on the prize, to not relent or become jaded or overly distracted from advancing on these problems that are several decades if not centuries old. To some, it may come off as jarring with how thin these issues are spread between each other in a short time, but that’s when you have to consider the notion that all modern sociopolitical ills are related to each other, something the band seem keenly aware of, otherwise why draw the lines between them with their art? The only No Kings I wanna hear about is Doomtree.
“III” is a culmination of power and emotion for Fainting Dreams and probably where they get their most melodic and approachable ever so far. There’s swells of instrumentation that heave the track back and forth like monstrous ocean waves under a ship, but large stretches of expanse where the melodies form and become the guiding force to the EP’s end. Frankly, it’s beautiful, something progressive and post-rock fans should adore and get chills from as I did. The whole EP sees Reynolds incorporate ethereally-sung clean vocals that pirouette all over the place with all the emotional efficacy of Ashe O’Hara, but she also incorporates her shrill shrieks that I miss so much from her other now-defunct project, Endless, Nameless.
This is where I’d say ‘and that’s it’, maybe not even in a negative or unfulfilled sense, just to declare a literal end, but the fact of the matter is The Silence of Birds That Rarely Sing is about as artistically and thematically coherent and encompassing as you can get for a 16-minute project. It’s looping for the fifth time right now (not including how many times I repeated individual tracks) and it’s starting to really gel for me in a way other projects, including full LPs, haven’t yet this year. The EP, though perhaps not directly, is about the complacency that we can find ourselves in. That’s what the silence of birds that rarely sing is: the norm, the status quo, and the unrocking of boats so as to have an easy, ignorant life at the expense of never pursuing a better life for ourselves and our neighbors. We ‘sing’ only when we are affected or when we stand to benefit from it. Well, we all need to find our voices real soon or we’re all going to see just how bad it can get and it’ll be too late to fix anything then, let alone have a ‘normal’ life.
All of Fainting Dreams‘ decisions for this EP stem back to that. Elle screams again likely because she too is fed up with the way things are, how she has been treated, and how we collectively are complicit in shoving it all out of frame or sweeping it under the rug. The band’s music returns to form, though greatly expanded upon here, to craft the sonic weight needed to convey the feelings of dread, disappointment, and sociopolitical lethargy that has led to this point. In some ways, we deserve this, but that shouldn’t be the sentence we end on. More must be done. We must make our peers, friends, and family uncomfortable so that they might become incensed to do more – anything – to fix any part of this, even just a bit for the future of our people. At the very fucking least, go see the band and others like them live, find community in that, and start there.
‘But that’s not your problem
Because how could they ever come for you next?
Too high on the food chain
But if that’s the case then when will it end?’
