Winnipeg art punks Tunic cut some of the genre’s most heart-pounding and apocalyptic soundscapes; the screams of vocalist David Schellenberg sound less of anger and more of desperation. Despite the band’s willingness to tweak their punishing formula between releases, they’ve never sounded quite as invigorated — or quite as close to the precipice of a major breakthrough — as they do on Wrong Dream, their caustic and invigorating third album.
Urgent, angular, unpredictable riffs are the predominant sound between tracks that can otherwise vary wildly in tempo, vocal delivery and lyrical subject matter. Evidence of Tunic’s versatility can be heard in a song like “My Body, My Blood,” which builds anxiously to their usual…
…rhythm from something more sombre, stable and patient. On the other hand, the album’s opening two tracks, “Sounds Repeat” and “Punishment Enough,” lean closer to a style that fans may already be familiar with from the likes of their previous album Quitter or the more broadly-spanning Exhaling compilation.
What Wrong Dream does to distinguish itself most clearly, and perhaps most effectively, is its willingness to build on atmospheres of space and silence in its production. For a band built on the power of hectic all-at-once instrumentals, a track like “Whispering” might be its own revelation — collecting different musical ideas in their own contexts and slowly but surely pressing them together into a vicious climax that feels earned in its own way.
As visceral as they’ve ever been, Tunic find a new angle to their sound in the form of more carefully constructed and suspenseful songwriting, structures that let the space between sounds speak for themselves more than ever before. These maddening rhythms adjust on a whim into something more frantic and uncertain, with each new method or idea arriving quickly and unapologetically. An added layer of maturity comes in the record’s insistence on reflection; if not Tunic’s best to date, Wrong Dream could be called their most uniquely introspective and stylistically varied.
It’s not necessarily the progression one might have expected from Tunic, but now that it’s here this new chapter feels, somehow, equally inevitable and surprising.