Evols

"The Ephemeral" delivers with its music exactly what its title promises: an end in itself, with its own chronology and an expiration-date anomaly. The new album by Evols — the fourth full-length release in the Porto-based collective’s discography — expands their psychedelic sound into more ornate territories, while keeping simple progressions and pop hooks as the compositional launching point.

Within these structures, clearly baroque elements emerge: grander synthesizers, layers of detail orchestrated through various instruments, all bringing colour to a negatively-tinged rock wave.

Across eight tracks, The Ephemeral synthesizes multiple moments and aesthetics, crafting a musical hermeneutics where references range from disco to the earliest pop moments of rock music, paving the way for no wave riffs to be elevated by Rodrigo Amado’s saxophone or the velvety vocals of Sara Macedo and Calcutá.

The opening track, Arp Drama, with its dizzying pace, sets the aesthetic tempo of the entire album. Strings lay the groundwork for the over-ornamentation that weaves from bridge to bridge, in every track — whether between two choruses in Trap, a guitar solo over an arpeggiated synth in Sol, or the more balanced single Actress, where rhythmically cut-up guitar parts clear the path for Amado’s breathy sax.

We define utopias as places that do not exist — which is precisely what one might expect from a rock record with a punk drive, warm rhythms, and visuals painted in synthesized sounds: traits we associate with specific moments in music history, in rock, pop, and disco. The Ephemeral proposes a healthy cohabitation of all the states of guitar matter in a single form. Its finite condition is the inevitable result of the impossibility it navigates. It is possible, as we hear, but only observable in the music of Evols.