Some bands slip quietly into the catalogue without fanfare and stick around. For me, Oh Hiroshima is one such band, and *And the Dead Tree Gives No Shelter* is a first encounter that draws me further in. It’s a driving album, carried by drums that grind away almost like a drone beneath the songs, with melodies that constantly find new and exciting directions. Great tracks, in the truest sense of the word – dreamy and heavy at the same time – and, throughout, vocals that seem to float rather than assert themselves.

The fact that the soundscape is so expansive and spacious makes sense when you see who’s been involved. The Swedish core tracks – drums, bass and guitars – were recorded at Studio Gröndahl with Karl Daniel Lidén, with further recording in Örebro, before Magnus Lindberg mixed and mastered the album for the third time with the band. They’ve also brought in a dozen or so guest musicians to work alongside songwriter Jakob Hemström, and it shows: the palette is broader and more layered than one might expect.

The title is taken from T.S. Eliot’s *The Waste Land*, and according to the band themselves, the dead tree symbolises ways of life that drain the world of meaning – a hopelessness that easily breeds cynicism. At the same time, the album reaches towards something brighter, towards conjuring up something meaningful. That tension between darkness and hope is precisely what I recognise in the music, where the heavy and the dreamy are constantly pulling in opposite directions without being torn apart.

With eight tracks, the album feels more like a single journey than a collection of individual songs. The lead single, ‘Broken Sunlight’, is a great introduction, but this is an album that only really reveals itself when you listen to it from start to finish – ideally on headphones.

A lovely first encounter, yes – but above all, a band I’m now going to keep an eye on.