Francesco Amoroso per TRISTE©

The Suncharms originally formed in 1989. Marcus Palmer and Richard Farnell were old school friends and huge music fans who decided to start a band. After playing some gigs in Sheffield around 1989-90, they recorded a few demo tapes and sent them to Wilde Club Records, who offered them a record deal. They released two EPs, recorded a session for John Peel, and then went their separate ways in the early 1990s. In 2015-16, after noticing online that they were being name-checked by shoegaze and indie fans in America, Japan, and Hawaii, The Suncharms were approached by Cloudberry Records, which was eager to release a retrospective album featuring their EPs and other unreleased material from the archives. That’s when all the original members of the band decided to give it another try: they booked a rehearsal room and started writing new material. In 2017, The Suncharms recorded two new songs, Red Dust and Film Soundtrack, which were released by Slumberland Records in 2018. Since then, the band has released two albums, Distant Lights and Things Lost (in 2021 and 2023) both for Sunday Records. Now they’re back with their most accomplished album to date, Darkening Sky: a true masterpiece, often closer to the jangling guitar sound of some Sarah Records acts then to the shoegaze sound of their early years. It’s full of wonderful melodies, lyrical introspection, shimmering guitars, a subtle rhythm section (with the occasional magnificent trumpet) and a cohesive and personal sonic identity.

Francesco Amoroso per TRISTE©

With his third album under his own name, Nightmare World I See The Horizon, Logan Farmer deepens the sense of quiet collapse that has long defined his work, expanding the intimate desolation of Still No Mother and A Mold For The Bell into something broader, more accusatory. If earlier releases asked how one might endure a world in decline, Nightmare World I See The Horizon poses a more unsettling question: how does one live with oneself while watching that decline unfold, comfortably and complicitly? The focus shifts toward the origins of ruin and our (as humans) uneasy role in sustaining it. Farmer’s songwriting still moves with a hushed, deliberate pace, rooted in fragile acoustic textures and spectral atmospheres, but the emotional register has subtly changed. The sorrow and dread remain, yet they are now threaded with a sense of shame. The result is a work that feels less like witnessing catastrophe and more like inhabiting it. There is a heightened self-awareness in both the lyrics and the arrangements, as though each sound has been carefully weighed. Building on the stark intimacy of A Mold For The Bell, which transformed everyday impressions into something ominous and reflective, Farmer now embraces a wider sonic palette. Elements of slowcore and Americana emerge giving the record a raw, spacious quality. The collaborations, subtle yet vital, add depth without disrupting the album’s core restraint. These textures frame a series of songs that drift between the personal and the collective, where environmental collapse, violence, and digital numbness blur into a single, continuous horizon. It is a stark, contemplative record: unflinching, immersive, and quietly devastating.