Album Review: Hands Like Houses - 'A T M O S P H E R I C S'
Hands Like Houses soar through the skies on the wings of their new vocalist, Josh Raven, with fifth album ‘Atmospherics’.
‘Atmospherics’, like any good story, is one that needs to begin at the beginning. Back in 2023, after fifteen years in the band, lead vocalist Trenton Woodley was leaving Hands Like Houses. For most bands, particularly ones that hadn’t released an album for almost five years, this would have been something of a death sentence. How do you make a band work without having a singer to fall back on? Add on the seemingly endless expanses of Australian landmass between each of the members, and you’ve got the making of a band forced to peter out into obscurity. A steadfast refusal to succumb, though, saw the AUS group rage, rage against the dying of their light and instead struggle on; one session here, a couple of songs there, always refusing to give in.
This thankfully resulted in 'Atmospherics'.
But that question around the vocalist remained. Initially, the band planned to leverage the friends and connections they’ve made over the past decade of touring — basically, each song would feature a different guest star, a new vocalist helping to push Hands Like Houses forward into their new era; you can still see this in the menagerie of artists ripped from seemingly any and every band under the sun, including the criminally underrated Ben Woolner from Australia electronica trio Safia, the match-made-in-heaven of Normandie’s Philip Strand, the immediately iconic Kellin Quinn, and a hell of a lot more
vocalists that the band have played with or toured with over the years.
And then Josh Raven entered the picture, and that, as they say, was that. The band had a new vocalist, a new album, myriad exciting new sounds and flavours, and a new drive: time to get to work.
Thus, ‘Atmospherics’ was born. The band’s fifth album — sixteen tracks split into four stanzas, each representative of a different atmospheric layer, starting at the bottom and then shooting for the stars by the end — is an incredibly bold and ambitious album, full of soaring highs and guttural lows… and the whole thing works like a charm.
Counting as the opener for both the first chapter, Tropos — meaning ‘change’, which is pretty damn fitting given what the album had to go through — and for the album as a whole, comes ‘Heaven’. Now, one could wax poetic about how ‘Heaven’ being the start of the chapter about where we live, perhaps making a comment on the need to make Heaven a place on Earth, says a lot… but then this review’ll take forever, so let’s let the music do the talking. The track’s slow and unassumingly melodic intro, keyboard and drums slamming inerrably through the echoing reverb, quickly devolves into Josh Raven’s pain-fuelled roar — and from there, you best strap in. It less sets the scene and more crashes you right into the middle of it, the track drowning you in its arena-ready roars and catchy hooks as a blend of reverberating soft vocals and angered shouts play atop of the band’s dynamic instrumentals; as first tracks go, you couldn’t really ask for more.
Well, unless you’re Hands Like Houses. Turns out, you can ask for more, and so much more than just one more track — arguably, ‘Heaven’, both is the start of the album and was the start of the album. It was always meant to feature the once-Small Town Heroes and The Faim vocalist — he was going to be one of the many musicians cajoled into featuring. If the track hadn’t felt so right for the band, the album might have fizzled out; instead, one song became sixteen and the first of what’ll hopefully be many tours to come.
In fact, the entire first quartet almost seems to exist just to show the quality of talent Hands Like Houses have access to. From the pounding ‘Better Before’, featuring Underoath’s Aaron Gillespie, shouts preceding the expected yet still delightful breakdown, or the Matthew Wright-featured ‘Paradise’, Josh Raven’s vocals fluctuating between defeated to infatuated as they compete with the serpentine sighs or distorted screams of the Getaway Plan frontman, to the sudden change of pace of ‘BLOODRUSH’, RedHook’s Emmy Mack helping propel the band to higher and higher heights, the effervescent, irresistible energy of the track crying out for an explosion of dancers and pits alike.
And then we’re onto the Stratosphere, ‘24 Hours’ momentarily floating on the warmth of the tracks before. Gone are the guests — Hands Like Houses have risen about such crutches (for now anyway). Instead, the band get to show off their new sound, led by the undeniable talent of Josh Raven. Fans of The Faim are well aware of his range — shove on ‘Amelie’ or ‘State of Mind’ to see for yourself — but ‘24 Hours’ signals the start of an entire stanza for the new Hands Like Houses vocalist to play with. There’s the almost shoegaze-y ethereality of ‘Hollow’, delicate vocals flourishing over the nutrient-rich layers of guitars and synth; there’s the furious urgency of ’Panic’, anxiety oozing from each and every note. And then there’s the metaphorical and very literal crescendos of ‘Wildfire’, a smoldering flame kept on the edge of extinguishing by the almost unrecognisable falsetto of Raven until it erupts into the fiery, atmospheric soundscapes of Cooper, Pearson, Tyrrell and Parkitny.
And then we’re onto the Mesosphere, said to be the coldest level of the Earth’s atmosphere. Opener ‘The Devil of Decisions’ seems to be a bit of misnomer; the only decision that matters is just how high you’re going to crank the volume. Building on top of the atmosphere created by those below, particularly ‘Hollow’ and ‘Wildfire’, the track seems to ebb and flow, buffeted by the air outside; if there’s a track better suited for some noise-cancelling headphones, I’ve yet to find it.
And then there’s the duo of ‘Hurts Like Hell’ and ‘Obey’.
There’re some duos in music that become instant classics. There’s some that become iconic — Shane MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl, Jay-Z and Chester Bennington — and then there’s some that seem so blatantly obvious in retrospect that it’s a wonder they’d never existed before.
‘Hurts Like Hell’, with Sweden’s Philip Strand, is one of the latter. Not for one of contrasts — if you don’t listen out for the accents, you might not even be able to tell quite who’s who. But that doesn’t matter when the heights that the two vocalists push each other to is so extreme. They lift each other up — quite literally in the bridge, seeming to egg each other on — and both drown in the bouncy, beautiful, banger of a track. The one caveat is that at times it’s hard to remember it’s a Hands Like Houses track; it could just as easily have been a Normandie track featuring Josh Raven.
In the same way, pairing Josh Raven with Kellin Quinn is one for the books. The Sleeping With Sirens’ frontman slotting his vocals into the Hands Like Houses track feels reminiscent of pulling on a new pair of socks: warm, comforting, and oh-so needed.
‘Chemicals’ could easily fall by the wayside given the rest of its quarter, yet somehow still manages to hold its own. It screams out to be played live — you can almost picture the blasts of steam in the chorus, the gently passing (yellow?) spotlights through the verses. And then comes the key change, Josh’s vocals feeling ever more vivacious with each thundering line, and you’re hooked.
Finally, the start of the end: we’re in the thermosphere. The sweeping instrumentals and Matt Cooper’s gorgeous guitar line play havoc under Raven’s vocals in ‘Fatally Fractured’, a beautiful splash of alt-metal experimentation, while the riffs of ‘ICU’ felt inevitable in their unwavering domination of the track. Similarly, ‘Parasite’ seems to hang on the clash of drums, pounding their way to prominence alongside the squealing guitars.
And then there’s the appropriately named ‘The End’. With Safia’s Benjamin Woolner seeming to take centre stage — and hopefully giving the ephemeral vocalist just a bit of that global exposure that Safia desperately and definitively deserve — ‘The End’ almost exists as a counter to what could have been: it’s the end of the beginning, rather than the beginning of the end. To have started a new chapter so thunderously, over
15 years in, and still be as strong as ever? That says a lot.
A brilliant album; let’s just hope we’ll get to it live over hear in the immediate future.
Words by James O’Sullivan
