Fainting Dreams
Our new music debut today is brooding, visceral, and primal. It is a undeveloped child in the womb of sweeping, sub oscillations prior to a head first evacuation into a world at war, where large language models write contemporary pop music and technocrats meddle in everything for money they can’t possibly spend… but I digress. Fainting Dreams, a quartet from Denver, Colorado have put ‘I’ into my inbox and I was hooked on the FIRST FUCKING LISTEN. Rob called it when he sent it my way, somehow ripping me from my funk of dungeon synth and JRPG soundtracks.
Steeped in ambience, sparsity, tasteful dissonance, and a gobsmacking of blackened screamo, ‘I’ is the opening to the incredibly powerful 3-song EP, Silence of Birds That Rarely Sing. Now look, we’re giving you but a taste, and that’s really unfair, particularly because the EP ebbs and flows in a way that really demands your full attention.
When Elle (guitar / vocals) tells us, “This is definitely our heaviest release, which has been a lot of fun for us. It’s always my goal to make every Fainting Dreams please different from the last, and we really feel like we were able to capture a level of atmosphere and dread that we’ve not been able to capture on previous releases,” we can only nod our heads in agreement. This song is certainly HEAVY, and it does have a certain heft, density, and gravitas that we haven’t really had the opportunity to showcase in some time.
‘I’ opens on slow, droning synthesizer. It teeters on eerie. It shifts and sloshes about, quieting, giving way to Elle’s voice sitting atop just-beyond-the-edge-of-breakup guitar notes. A powerful voice, seraphic and beautiful. The drums begin to ramp, the reverb soaked instrumentation layered as the guitars pace hastens, we are on the brink of sonic annihilation, and as the guitar crescendos into a massive wash of post-blackgaze your expectations are turned on their head as Elle’s voice carries until the END the tremolo riff, and everything starts to drop out, the instrumentation paving the way for something more.
“CHRONIC ILLNESS/PAIN AND THE MEDICAL NEGLIGENCE YOU EXPIERIENCE WHEN YOU’RE A PERSON SUFFERING FROM THESE THINGS IS A BIG THEME IN THIS FIRST TRACK WHICH TIES INTO THE OVERALL THEME OF A PEOPLE’S TENDENCY TO REMAIN WILLFULLY IGNORANT TO PROBLEMS THAT DON’T DIRECTLY AFFECT THEM. THE ALBUM’S ALSO VERY FOCUSED ON HOUSINS ISSUES, ENVIORMENTAL COLLAPSE, AND THE GENOCIDE HAPPENING IN PALESTINE”.
- ELLE, @FAINTINGDREAMSBAND
There is this subversion of our expectations. Where the song seems to build and build, Elle’s voice another layer to the instrumentation, you’re driving toward this breaking point, you’re ready for the unholy consulate of screamo to cast judgment upon you. You want to hear that snare drum pop into dense layers of tremolo picking and blast beats. When we look at a band like Oathbreaker, and you examine some of the composition on Rheia, you gain an understanding of what you think you want (and we do want that). Fainting Dreams provides this different approach, an aesthetic notion that states that space and density bring this primal heaviness. The juxtaposition of this build up ending into the click of sticks on the rims of the kit and Elle’s voice coming in with pained screams is the exact moment our expectations get dumped head over heels.
Where the groups previous works span a different body, they are not so dissimilar. Where You Can Be Anything leaned into a more ethereal and spacey composition, piano and unending sustain, alongside vocals from Elle and Allison Lorenzen and Midwife. This exploration into of shoe gaze and dream pop in October of 2025 seems to flow effortlessly into 2026, in a way that seems to marry the bands earlier, guitar driven work.
Fainting Dreams is hitting the southwest soon alongside Portal to the God Damn Blood Dimension at the start of April, coinciding with the release of the full Silence of Birds That Rarely Sing EP.
These tracks were recorded and produced by Jared Barnes at that bands preferred studio, Swadley studios. ’I’ and the rest of the tracks can be enjoyed in full on April 6th, courtesy of Softseed Music. This shit needs to be listened to in full to be truly experienced.
Follow Fainting Dreams on Instagram here : @faintingdreams
Writer : @garevthistle
Editor : @just_reidz
03/17/26
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