Explosions in the Sky – End
September 8, 2023
“It never fails to amaze me the power of music when love is at its core. It is the reason we get out of bed every morning. To hope that we can continue to show that beauty is still around and in all of us. Thank you for doing what you do and helping us through this life.”
– Simon Raymonde (Cocteau Twins), in a message sent to Explosions in the Sky after hearing End, the band’s first album in seven years End, the enigmatic seventh album by Explosions in the Sky, was inspired by darkness, but became a loud, dramatic, wild rumination on life and death.
“Our starting point was the concept of an ending—death, or the end of a friendship or relationship. Every song comes from a story, or an idea one of us has had that we’ve all expanded on and made its own world. Maybe it’s our nature, but we kept feeling that the album title was ultimately open to a lot more interpretation—the end of a thing or a time can mean a stop, but it can also mean a beginning, and what happens after one thing ends might pale in comparison to what it becomes next,” says the band about the album.
End is perhaps the “grandest” Explosions in the Sky album – melding the quiet restraint and crushing feel of their early releases with the sonic texturing and ornate experimentation of their later releases, and their increasingly deep film and television scoring catalog, influenced by personal tastes stretching from classical to soul to experimental ambient music.
The title “End” furthers a story arc reflected in the album titles that started with the “innocence” of their first album (How Strange, Innocence), progressed through the idealism and romanticism of their second and third albums (Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Live Forever and The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place), followed by the introspection (All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone and Take Care Take Care Take Care) and big-picture focus (The Wilderness) of their most recent albums. The band announced “The End Tour” this spring, bringing their legendary live show experience to 26 cities around the world in 2023. More dates are expected to be announced soon. They are currently scoring a new, undisclosed, television series that will premiere in 2024. End is the band’s seventh, but not final, studio album. Explosions in the Sky – End
September 8, 2023
About Explosions in the Sky
Explosions in the Sky are an iconic instrumental rock band from Texas that have become the gold standard for bold, emotional, cinematic music and are known for their incendiary live concerts. They’ve slowly grown from playing DIY spaces and opening for Fugazi to having headlined Radio City Music Hall, Royal Albert Hall, the Greek Theatre, and the Sydney Opera House. Over 24 years of being a band (with the same four members the entire time), they’ve achieved remarkable commercial success from an especially non-commercial corner of the music world, selling more than 1.3 million copies over six studio albums, and scoring five major motion pictures in the process. They’ve become the sound of modern sports films, documentaries and television, due largely to their genre-defining Friday Night Lights score, and they’ve been asked to tour with artist fans as diverse as Nine Inch Nails, Smashing Pumpkins, The Flaming Lips, and Death Cab for Cutie, while managing to not sound like any other popular artist.
End Credits
Written and performed by Christopher Hrasky, Michael James, Mark T. Smith, and Munaf Rayani Produced by John Congleton and Explosions In The Sky Recorded at Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas
Engineered and mixed by John Congleton
Assistant engineers: Gerardo “Jerry” Ordonez and Diego Mendoza
Mastered by Bernie Grundman
Artwork by Pat Perry
Design by Ben Dickey
Explosions in the Sky – Studio Albums
– How Strange, Innocence (2000)
– Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Live Forever (2001)
– The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place (2003)
– All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone (2007)
– Take Care Take Care Take Care (2011)
– The Wilderness (2016)
Explosions in the Sky – Film Scores
– Friday Night Lights (2004)
– Lone Survivor (2013)
– Prince Avalanche (2013)
– Manglehorn (2014)
– Big Bend (2022)
Exit Angles
Exit Angles is a philosophy of breaking free. The path to inner and outer freedom. To be wide
open and unafraid to accept the realness that lurks behind the surface of pretension. To be your
most unapologetic self, and to see the real in others and encourage it with every fiber of a
compassionate heart. To scream for life, unfiltered and limitless. To reach for possibilities
beyond our materialistic society.
There may be a way out, a way to exit the capitalist model and enter fully into community, DIY.
An exchange with no sense of possession or lack. Just being. Becoming what you’ve always
been and shedding the roles and identities we’ve put on to cope. Art and music with no
commercial intentions is needed more than ever.
Remember how music makes you feel when you’re alone? Remember when you got
goosebumps at shows? Remember feeling like you didn’t know where this performance might
go? This is the atmosphere at Exit Angles shows. Pure music: Rock and Roll. Drums, bass, and
guitars through loud amps projecting vibrations through the air. No tricks, no gadgets; pure
sound with pure intent. Behind it, songs that pierce the heart, singing of a common pain, and a
common yearning. Speaking out against the traps that ensnare us, conform us, that tell us to
give up trying to transform the hideous world we’ve created. Asking questions: are we
consumers, or are we builders? Are we just trying to obtain our own comfortable life in this
world? Do our actions match our words?
We need to encourage each other to pick up the fight, to detach from the tethers that keep us
spinning in our own ego orbit. To open up. To see unity, and not division.
If you find yourself at an Exit Angles show, you will witness four individuals playing pure soul
music with total joy and total commitment. Not the genre “soul,” but the substance of who we
are. You will see channelers, thrown about the stage, bouncing here and there, in ecstatic
meditation. Witness the faces; the story is, we need this.
exitangles.com
