UK post-rock/shoegaze quartet Wildernesses stream their debut album »Growth«; out now via Floodlit Recordings!

London, UK based post-rock/shoegaze quartet Wildernesses has just released their debut album »Growth« on March 27th, 2026 via Floodlit Recordings.

Tracklist:
01. Sleepless
02. Happy Hollow
03. [dread]
04. English Darkness
05. Terrible Bloom
06. Maintenance
07. Cassino
08. Four Hour Drive
09. Summertime, 1917

Courtesy of Hold Tight PR:

Wildernesses began not as a band but as a story, the kind whispered in low voices beside fires in the quiet hours after loss, tales that linger and reshape those who hear them. In a world continually hurtling towards the next era, their music offers a pause, a hand on the shoulder urging you to breathe and step into a different kind of space.

Set to release their nine track debut »Growth« on 27th March via Floodlit Recordings, the band emerge as modern day folk chroniclers cloaked in atmospheric alt-rock, conjuring dream-scorched landscapes and intimate emotional terrain drawn from London and its outskirts. Their songs beckon rather than demand, drawing listeners into a world that feels both achingly familiar and quietly reassuring.

The four members came together almost by accident, their paths intersecting through an almost mythic catalyst, former guitarist, Jonathan, the invisible fifth member. He was the match striker, the summoner who gathered them from disparate lives and disparate musical trajectories, only to vanish before the story truly began. It was in the post-pandemic lull when hope and motivation had thinned, that Jonathan brought drummer Ryan Browne and vocalis Phillip Morris together, reigniting a passion for – and belief in – songwriting. Phillip’s past life fronting Hull’s Late Night Fiction had sharpened his craft into something personal and unflinching, tempered by grief and memory. Bassist Mark Portnoi brought the emotional depth and textural nuance honed over years in We Never Learned To Live and Earth Moves. Guitarist Sam Howe completed the circle in 2025, reconnecting with Mark through childhood bonds. Each carried their own ‘wilderness’, Hull and the Humber riverside, East London grit, West Sussex roots, weaving them into a singular sonic and narrative tapestry.

Photo credit: Joey Atchison

At the heart of this collective is Phillip, a storyteller and observer. His lyrics are modern folk tales, drawn from the real lives he encounters, the families and individuals he works with as a mental health professional within the NHS, the private dramas of ordinary survival, the quiet heroism in coping with trauma. Just as ancient storytellers captured loss, love and the terrors of the unknown, Phillip’s songs chart contemporary rites of passage, grief in hospital corridors, inherited trauma, the odd magic of human resilience, the moments that carve us into who we become.

Much of the emotional spine of Wildernesses comes from Phillip’s own life. His mother’s diagnosis with motor neurone disease forced him to step away from music previously, to care and to witness the fragility and endurance of human life. This experience became one of the many underground rivers flowing through »Growth«, their debut album. Her decline, her courage and her love formed a constellation guiding the songs, not confessional but mythic, transmuting personal pain into communal understanding. It is a story of tenderness and terror, of the small but stubborn ways people endure, a cycle mirrored in the album’s title.

Wildernesses’ music inhabits the liminal spaces between shoegaze’s glow, post-rock’s slow burning cinematics and the clarity of pop songwriting. The band define themselves as ’emotive heavy, not heavy heavy’, privileging feeling over distortion, mood over volume. With a sound that draws from the wide-eyed ambience of Explosions In The Sky, the fragile intensity of Bon Iver, the brooding restraint of The National, the dreamlike haze of Slowdive and the narrative urgency of La Dispute. Their name reflects the terrains they explore, interior wildernesses of memory, grief and reflection, wild, unkempt, sometimes bleak yet undeniably beautiful.

Their first singles became story seeds in themselves. »Four Hour Drive« (May 2025, Floodlit Recordings) unfolded around a 1957 photograph of Phillip’s father and grandfather, a meditation on lineage, responsibility and the quiet hauntings we inherit. »English Darkness« (August 2025) was shot amid the stark flats of Sunk Island in Hull, Phillip’s birthplace, with direction from Stewart Baxter, known for his work with IDLES, it traced the fragile edges of mental health, the song and its visuals capturing the balance of sorrow, absurdity and care. »Maintenance«, with its collage-style masks and cut-and-stick surrealism, found myth in domestic minutiae, while other tracks on »Growth« map a constellation of human experience: »Sleepless«’s insomnia, »Happy Hollow«’s solitary escapism, »[dread.]«’s dual narrative of anxiety, »Terrible Bloom«’s forbidden desire, »Cassino«’s instrumental reflection on family heritage and »Summertime, 1917«’s hidden love letters unearthed during a house renovation, tracing loss and history. Each song forms a chapter in the album’s story cycle, echoing the very real rhythms of life, grief and the enduring positivity of human spirit.

Phillip’s vision reaches beyond the music, shaping the band’s visual identity and guiding its creative aesthetic. From photographs of bathrooms and street corners to hungover pigeon epiphanies, Wildernesses transform the ordinary into mythic spaces. Every object, window and snapshot becomes a talisman, a portal into the everyday folklore of modern life.

Onstage, Wildernesses unfold their music like living stories. From intimate rooms at The Lexington to Ramsgate Music Hall, and from their first headline show at O2 Academy Islington to a festival appearance at AKARI in Manchester, they immerse audiences in narrative soundscapes where each crescendo, silence and shimmer carries emotional weight. BBC Introducing, Knotfest, Visions Magazine, Hardbeat, GBHBL, Total Rock Radio and DKFM Shoegaze Radio and more have all championed their early work, drawn to the honesty and gravity of their craft.

»Growth«, due 27th March 2026 on Floodlit Recordings, expands this universe into nine tracks, two instrumental, seven lyrical, each a vessel of loss, heritage, mental health, grief and quiet rebirth. It is music that resists spectacle yet feels cinematic, intimate yet epic, a meditation on the ordinary rendered extraordinary. It is a landscape of emotional wilderness where sadness, beauty and quiet resilience coexist. The album was brought to life at No Studio in Manchester with producer and engineer Joe Clayton (Conjurer, Mastiff, Bossk, Leeched). From the first session, the band connected with Joe’s calm, thoughtful approach, his meticulous attention to detail and his talent for crafting rich, textured soundscapes, a skill evident in his work with his own band, Pijn. His guidance helped shape »Growth« into a record that feels both expansive and intimately detailed, capturing the emotional depth and cinematic qualities that define Wildernesses’ sound.

In a world that moves relentlessly forward, Wildernesses invite listeners to step into the slow orbit of memory, to hear modern folk tales told through guitars, voices and textures that feel at once personal and universal. Their tale is only just beginning but already they stand as one of the most compelling and distinctive voices in the UK’s atmospheric rock scene, storytellers for the present, holding back the tide long enough for us to listen.

Order »Growth« here:
floodlitrecordings.com | wildernessesband.bandcamp.com

Wildernesses are:
Phillip Morris – Vocals, Guitar
Sam Howe – Guitar
Mark Portnoi – Bass
Ryan Browne – Drums

FFO: Slowdive, Explosions In The Sky, Idlewild, Whirr, Cigarettes After Sex, Bon Iver

Bojan Bidovc // music enthusiast, promoter, misanthrop and sometimes a journalist as well