Atlanta collective Blackfox returns with their fourth full-length, Blackfox4, an album that wears its evolution openly. What started a decade ago as a swamp-rock power trio has widened into a seven-piece ensemble capable of shifting from punk urgency to atmospheric art-rock in the same breath. The record was pieced together slowly, rehearsed deeply, and sanded down to its emotional and musical grain with the afterglow of post-pandemic reconnection running through the whole thing. The band’s three lead singers share the storytelling space, with their voices trading perspective on longing, grief, joy, and the strange poetry of being human with other humans.
“Beaming” opens the album with a striking sense of lift. The guitars shimmer and dig at the same time, the drums punch forward, and Andy Gish’s soaring vocal lands somewhere between catharsis and electric infatuation. It’s that sudden, involuntary smile-in-public feeling, bottled and plugged into an amp. You can hear the band’s Southern and West Coast lineage here with the sun-streaked melodies grounded by muscular rhythm.
Later on, “Difficult” leans more Springsteen than new wave, as a reconciliation ballad. Stacey Cargal sings with a worn tenderness, his thick voice nearly cracking as the chorus pleads, “Can we meet in the middle somehow, just for a moment now?” The guitars push like they’re trying to climb back toward something remembered with love, or hope, or maybe just the chance to try again.
The album closes on “Sacred,” a slow-burning, prog-flecked journey in shifting time signatures. Monica Arrington’s rich, steady vocal floats first, before Cargal’s voice enters in low, weight-bearing counterpoint. Drums thump, guitars layer, and textures bloom until the song feels like a cathedral built from distortion and breath.
Blackfox4 is eclectic, coherent, familiar, and newly sharpened, as they embody the sound of a band not just finding itself, but choosing itself, again. Check it out on Spotify.
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Review by: Naomi Joan