Don’t you just hate it when you come across a new band that sounds damn awesome, only to find out that they have already disbanded. It has happened to me with Aussie-prog bands more often than I would like to admit. Now, hailing from Cardiff, the capital of Wales, FORT is (was) a post-rock four-piece that released their debut and their last full-length in one fell swoop, independently on February 20th, 2026. Entitled “A Token of Our Depreciation,” the album is a cinematic post-rock affair comprised of eight tracks. On their Bandcamp profile, the band states, “After nine years and 70 shows, FORT will be disbanding. We’ve had a wild ride and achieved more than we ever imagined with the band, but after much discussion, we’ve decided to move on from it separately.” I’m a sucker for the cinematically tinged post-rock aesthetic by default, but when a random band cites monoliths such as CASPIAN, AND SO I WATCH YOU FROM AFAR, SLEEPMAKESWAVES, and MOGWAI as influences, it is especially important to check them out. With references like these, there is a good chance that the music will tickle the ear in all the right ways. The raw emotion conveyed by the music sounds, obviously, a tad more poignant in this case, with the foreknowledge that the band is no longer active. Once again, I couldn’t dig up much info about the band; as per the conventions of the genre, these post-rock rogues prefer to remain enshrouded in mystery. Through extensive Sherlock Holmes maneuvers, I could gather the names of the musicians involved, but not much further info as to say which instrument is played by whom. It’s becoming something of a factory default with these underground post-rock acts that it takes a lot of work and voodoo to find them in the digital realm. As luck would have it, FORT proved to be one of those bands whose contributions to the post-rock gene pool were well worth the effort.
The game is set afoot with “Alizarin Sky,” with the title referring to a deep red pigment that has quite an eventful history, dating back to ancient Egypt. Even if you aren’t familiar with its dramatic color, its exotic name should be enough to evoke highly cinematic mental images upon which the music certainly adds resonant layers. The song is a slowly evolving instrumental affair with subtle Middle-Eastern flourishes – I reckon the main guitar motifs are in Phrygian or in some of its derivative modes. In instrumental music, that’s the perfect recipe for evoking impressions of, say, gazing at the desert sun disappearing below the horizon while painting the sky alizarin crimson. It may be a somewhat clichéd approach, but it’s hard to mind, really, because it just works.
The second album track could be a sly reference to the band’s situation – “Nothing Lasts, Nothing Is Finished, Nothing Is Perfect.” On the other hand, the title could work just as well as a somewhat Zen-like nugget of wisdom. The song turns the gold standard of the genre, that “from whisper to a scream” approach over the course of 10 minutes, on its head by kicking off with a high-octane riffage. By post-rock standards, the song is relatively short, and somewhere around the middle, the riffs give way to a more plaintive, atmospheric soundscapes, before the coda brings the riffs back. In addition to the aforementioned influences, I would add bands such as LONG DISTANCE CALLING and GOD IS AN ASTRONAUT. Then again, all these “big names” in the post-rock circles sound somewhat similar – you can tell them apart only by subtle nuances. What sets FORT apart from those two bands above, for example, is that they use keyboard textures quite sparingly, more like a seasoning rather than an essential element of a song. You can hear a filter sweep here and ambient texture there, but mostly the guitars do the heavy lifting. So, unsurprisingly, the album is mostly a riff-driven endeavor.
That said, after three high-octane riffers, the momentum mellows out a bit for quite a few tracks. First, “From Sullen Earth” is a mid-tempo riffer with a highly evocative, ambient intro. It’s hard to say whether the intro’s haunting ambience was created by a synth or some state-of-the-art boutique reverb, but damn! It sounds delicious! Then, “Your House Is On Fire, Yet Still Feels Like Home” is an atmospheric journey in triplet meter. After a good number of pretty intense riffers in four-to-the-floor, the change of meter, even as subtle as this, works rather nicely. For the next two tracks, the mood mellows out even further. “Barod” (Welsh for “ready”) does not even sound like post-rock, to be honest, but more like an instrumental ballad from the glory days of shoegaze in the 1990s. Lastly, “Ydym Ni Yno Eto” (Welsh for “We are there again”) is the only track that’s not driven by guitars, but since it clocks in around 2 minutes, I reckon it is merely a piano interlude type of thing.
The penultimate track, “The Future Is Not What It Used to Be,” picks up the pace by throwing in some nice, high-octane riffs again. It is by far one of the highlights of the album, perhaps due to the fact that it boasts more prominent keyboard motifs and intricate rhythms than the previous bangers. The piano ostinatos in the song’s coda sound especially epic. In a way, the song serves as an introduction to the 7-minute closer, “Viridian Sky.” Once again, the title refers to a color. Viridian is a greenish-blue pigment, so I reckon there could be an overarching theme to the songs, one which obviously is completely open to a wild array of interpretations since the music is inherently instrumental – the journey from a red sky to a green one, whatever that could mean. On a post-rock album, you could practically put any of the songs as the closer since they are all epic and anthemic by default. So, no surprises here: the song wraps everything up as it’s supposed to – on nothing short of a haunting note. So, now that I have been spinning this beast quite a few times, it’s even more frustrating to know that the band has already called it quits. As the whole post-rock universe is becoming slightly oversaturated with all sorts of snake-oil merchants, it’s a damn shame that a band of this caliber decided to disband. Their swan song of an album is a real treat.
Written by Jani Lehtinen
Tracklist
- Alizarin Sea
- Nothing Lasts, Nothing Is Finished, Nothing Is Perfect
- Disintegrator
- From Sullen Earth
- Your House Is On Fire Yet Still Feels Like Home
- Barod
- Ydym Ni Yno Eto?
- The Future Is Not What It Used To Be
- Viridian Sky
Lineup
Ben Hooper
Matthew Moore
Gavin O’Driscoli
Craig Prosser
Label
Independent
Links
https://fortmusicuk.bandcamp.com/album/a-token-of-our-depreciation
