Cloakroom announce new album 'Dissolution Wave,' share "A Force At Play"

Cloakroom recently posted a photo that appeared to be teasing new music, and now they’ve officially announced a new album. It’s called Dissolution Wave, and it comes out January 28 via Relapse (pre-order). It’s also a “space western” concept album, as the press release explains:

Cloakroom’s Dissolution Wave is a space western in which an act of theoretical physics—the dissolution wave—wipes out all of humanity’s existing art and abstract thought. In order to keep the world spinning on its axis, songsmiths must fill the ether with their compositions. Meanwhile, the Spire and Ward of Song act as a filter for human imagination: Only the best material can pass through the filter and keep the world turning.

This is the philosophical universe that Cloakroom guitarist/vocalist Doyle Martin conceived as a way of processing the last few years. “We lost a couple of close friends over the course of writing this record,” he says. “Dreaming up another world felt easier to digest than the real nitty-gritty we’re immersed in every day.”

With lyrics based on an imagined cosmology, Dissolution Wave also marks a grand expansion of Cloakroom’s dynamic space-rock palette, which is strongly felt on the album’s airy and pastoral lead single, “A Force At Play”. Written from the perspective of the album’s protagonist—an asteroid miner who writes songs by night—“The miner is talking about ‘bottling lightning beams,’ which is a new take on the old music industry term ‘lightning in a bottle,’ which can pertain to a fire ass track or a good bottle of homemade booze,” Martin points out. “As you can imagine, bottling lightning is a pretty hard thing to do.”

“A Force At Play” falls on Cloakroom’s lighter side, really leaning into their ’90s shoegaze/dream pop influences and turning away from their trademark sludge. It’s a very promising first taste, and you can listen and watch the video (directed by Colorshift and Cloakroom) below.

The album is Cloakroom’s first with new drummer Tim Remis, and it features loops and piano by Hum’s Matt Talbott (on “Doubts”), and percussion by Sweet Cobra’s Jason Gagovski (on “Lost Meaning”). The album was engineered and mixed by Cloakroom’s longtime sound engineer Zac Montez.

Recently, Cloakroom frontman Doyle Martin (who’s also now in Nothing) and bassist Bobby Markos spoke to us about their favorite albums of 2021.

Tracklist
1 – Lost Meaning
2 – Dissolution Wave
3 – A Force At Play
4 – Dottie back Thrash
5 – Fear Of Being Fixed
6 – Lambspring
7 – Doubts
8 – Dissembler