With their debut album Fire By The Silos, Toska have reconciled their staggering mastery of instrumentation with a deep sense of musicality seldom found outside the works of film score heavyweights Thomas Newman, Olafa Arnolds, Vangelis and Hanz Zimmer. Creating a body of work that resonates with a global audience on a profoundly animalistic level.
Set in the not so distant future,​ Fire By The Silos​ is a concept album that follows a nameless narrator’s fall from sanity into a world of abhorrence, animosity and revenge after losing his job at ‘the ministry’ to government cuts. Through relentlessly aggressive odysseys ‘When Gengis Wakes’ and ‘Abomasum’ to the hauntingly beautiful, contemplative epilogue ‘Prayermonger’, the narrator’s journey is concluded upon the realisation that he’s become an epitome of everything he was fighting against.
The social commentary of Toska’s music may be subtle outside of title track ‘Fire By The Silos’ featuring our nameless narrator, but their ability to capture feelings of utter rage and suffering alongside sheer hope and loss across is staggering. Not only achieved across the space of an album, but single tracks like ‘A Tall Order’ and ‘Congress’, their prowess in emotional literacy is something that few have demonstrated to this level of detail.
Toska speaks to an audience who share a fascination with intelligently written music that strikes a chord with something deep inside everyone that’s rarely vocalised. If you’re someone who lives in extremes, looking for something other than the clinical, compressed, over-polished releases of Periphery and Tesseract, look no further than Fire By The Silos. It’s the best album you’ll hear all year.
