Since their formation in Montreal 30 years ago, Godspeed You! Black Emperor have come to seem timeless, their imposing musical aesthetic and DIY modus operandi wholly unaffected by changes in technology or the music industry. Unless you’re reading their liner-note communiques closely, there’s little on a formal level to distinguish a 1999 Godspeed record from a 2021 one. But the title of Godspeed’s eighth album instantly dates itself—and that’s the point. As textual exercises go, “NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD” is like The Zone of Interest condensed to album-spine format, contrasting the mundane formalities of naming a record with the horrors unfolding in Gaza at the time of its conception while also forcing us to consider where that number stands today. The cover art conveys a similarly defeatist air—in lieu of the artfully blurred photographs or evocative illustrations of old, we get a stark picture of gear, furniture, and dirty cutlery strewn about a hermetic jam space, as if the band was too numbed to come up with any other ideas.
But while discussions of Godspeed’s music often revolve around their staggering quiet-to-cataclysmic ascents, the band’s real power lies in their emotional dynamism, and the way the tone of their work can so easily turn from tragic to triumphant. From their earliest days, Godspeed have performed with Super-8 films projected behind them, and at a certain point in each show, the flickering images of cityscapes give way to a simple handwritten message—“HOPE”—that looks like it was scrawled by someone trying to hold onto their sanity deep into a lengthy prison sentence. But on their most recent albums, Godspeed have treated “HOPE” more like a Bat signal: As the world’s doom spiral has accelerated, Godspeed have responded with the most elating music in their canon. And while the title “NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD” provides an unspeakably grim reminder of the context that birthed it, the music sounds more defiantly exultant than ever.
“NO TITLE” is not without its mournful, meditative passages (could an interstitial track called “Broken Spires at Dead Kapital” be anything but?), but the album more frequently provides accessible and expedient pathways to its moments of communal ecstasy. It’s a record that welcomes you in rather than making you work for it: With its valorous guitar intro, sweetly swelling strings, and gently jazzy drums wafting in like a cool breeze, the opening “Sun Is a Hole, Sun Is Vapors” has no interest in scaling the same heights as Godspeed’s most volcanic epics; rather, it invites you to savor an experience that’s as simple and profound as a sunrise. Likewise, the bookending closer “Grey Rubble – Green Shoots” is another relative rarity in the Godspeed canon, packing the slow-climb/crescendo/comedown schematic of a 20-minute suite into a relatively concise 6:57. By Godspeed standards, this feels practically like a pop single (and all the more so when you realize its central circular melody kinda sounds like “Chopsticks”).
