EP Review: What Will Be - Primordial

What Will Be unearths an ancient yet emotionally immediate EP experience, one that grapples with questions older than the spoken word itself.

Primordial

Some EP experiences are less about making statements and more about going back to a certain time, a point of origin that feels like something ancient is waking within its heavy, celestial, modern body. Primordial, the new EP from What Will Be, belongs firmly within that universe. A work that digs beneath heavy musical artistry and draws on the roots of emotion, memory, and instinct, Primordial takes on the balancing act of unveiling a raw, unvarnished soundscape and has compiled it into a moving 4-song EP.

What Will Be is a band that has always flirted with tension and vulnerability. With Primordial, the band experiments with this duality a bit more, sharpening its tension like a blade, yet softening that blow with a softness that almost feels elemental. Earth, bone, breath, and pulse converge in the opening moments of “On The Wind” and “Tides,” with its production and instrumental energies providing a sense of clarity that is deeply felt and intentional. Primordial is leading with tracks for ornamental intrigue, but to make each sound feel as if it’s reaching back to a non-verbal communicative style of feeling.

What Will Be

Primordial continues to carve this sonic palette of fire and brimstone with its last two tracks, “Into The Fire” and “From The Earth.” Leading with one of the EP’s best offerings, “Into The Fire,” its guitar riffs vibrate like tectonic plates, grinding and shifting beneath the ritualistic precision of its drums and melodic vocal surface, before emerging into the final track, “From The Earth.” A very quick detour from the last tracks' melodically charged experience, “From The Earth” conveys a sense of movement that is not completely straightforward. It’s not an experience that moves forward but rather into the volcanic recesses of the deep, traveling into the tumultuous emotional substrata rather than upward toward catharsis.

Primordial is an EP that carries this sort of wounded resilience, one that doesn’t ask to be healed but instead acknowledges the beauty in feeling the pain, one that words can’t convey. Primordial asks its listeners: What do we inherit from the past versions of ourselves we shed to form someone new? With a desire to evolve, how much of that is rooted in survival, and how much of it is avoiding the past to avoid the sting of making the wrong choice? What Will Be creates a spiritual way of writing, not one that is religious in its context, but one that treats emotion as something to be treasured, a sacred piece of ourselves that allows us to still retain what is left of human existence. Primordial is a small offering, yet each track is gravid in illuminating a fragment of the truth, placed gently at a pulpit of self-understanding.