Hide and Shine Release Their Third Album "9 Seconds Before Revolution"

I love a band that makes you wonder whether someone has accidentally left the doors open between several completely different musical universes. Hide and Shine are one such band, and 9 Seconds Before Revolution, their third album, is what happens when post-punk, grunge, classic rock, metal, country and psychedelic darkness all wander into the same room and decide that rather than fighting it out, they might as well form a band.

And why not? Genre is useful up to a point, I suppose, but there comes a moment when you have to stop worrying about where something belongs and simply listen to the damn thing.

Hide and Shine describe themselves as “An Art Death Indie Post-Punk Rock Alternative,” which is a magnificent phrase because it sounds like it means everything and absolutely nothing. It is also the sort of description that makes you want to put the record on immediately, if only to discover whether the music can possibly live up to the linguistic chaos.

Thankfully, it can.

There is something reassuring about the band's sound, with echoes of The Replacements, Dinosaur Jr. and Radiohead, but these aren't exercises in musical archaeology. Hide and Shine take those reference points, throw in some grunge, punk abrasion, heavier rock and psychedelic weirdness, give the whole lot a good shake and see what falls out. And it turns out it's rather good.

“Cascade” arrives with that wonderful combination of melody and ragged energy that makes alternative rock so addictive in the first place. It is too melodic to be garage rock, too scruffy to be polished alt-rock and too musically restless to sit quietly in the corner labelled Indie. “Chopper” takes things somewhere darker, while “Denouement” builds a wonderfully dense sense of momentum. Then there is “All We Are Is Nothing But A Weekend”, which sounds like the sort of song that could start an argument in a bar before anyone has worked out what the argument is actually about.

Good music does that.

There is an even stranger story behind the songs. Chris Kelly, the band's songwriter, describes experiencing what he calls a “psychic download” of music. Back in 2020, around 50 songs arrived in his head, eventually becoming the material for the band's debut album. For this record, another 19 songs apparently appeared over the course of a few weeks, with nine eventually making the cut.

So somewhere in the universe there are ten rejected Hide and Shine songs floating around in the ether. I want to hear those too.

The band's songwriting process is equally unconventional. The music comes first, with nonsense words filling the vocal spaces before Kelly returns to the finished recordings and writes down whatever words emerge. It is less “here is what I want to say” and more “right, let's see what this thing has been trying to tell me.”

It perhaps explains why the lyrical world of 9 Seconds Before Revolution feels so wonderfully unpinned. Interdimensional consciousness, alchemy, virtual reality, UFO's and the general absurdity of being a human being all make appearances. Heavy stuff, certainly, but there is humour and curiosity here too.

And despite the darker atmosphere, this isn't an album drowning in its own apocalypse. There is genuine affection for humanity underneath the noise, a sense that all this uncertainty might still be worth investigating rather than simply running away from.

Musically, that translates into an album that keeps moving. Guitars grind, melodies emerge, rhythms push forward and psychedelic shadows occasionally wander across the walls. It is rock music, certainly, but rock music that has been left alone with its imagination for too long.

Because 9 Seconds Before Revolution is the sort of record that reminds you why people still make albums in the first place. Not to fit neatly into a playlist, not to satisfy an algorithm and certainly not to make the genre police happy.

Just to make something interesting. Something that makes you want to turn it up. And then, perhaps, wonder what on earth just happened.

PS: I still want those other ten songs.

Keep up with everything Hide & Shine on their Website