Bark Psychosis

Since 1986 · United Kingdom

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Hex (1994)

Hex moves with a hushed, dub-inflected patience that has as much in common with ambient music as with rock. "Absent Friend" builds around Graham Sutton's restrained vocal and a slow, spacious arrangement that leaves as much room for silence as for sound, never rushing toward a payoff. The album's textures — jazz-inflected drumming, dub-style production space, guitar used more for atmosphere than riffs — helped give critics the vocabulary to name an entire genre after it. Decades later, it still sounds like the quiet, exploratory record other bands' loud catharses were reacting against.

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Bark Psychosis

Hex · 1994

Bark Psychosis formed in London in the mid-1980s, evolving over several years from a more conventionally aggressive sound into something considerably more spacious and atmospheric under the direction of guitarist and vocalist Graham Sutton. By the time of Hex (1994), the band had arrived at a sound built on hushed dynamics, jazz-inflected drumming, and dub-influenced production space, closer to ambient music than to any of the post-punk or hardcore scenes the band's members had come from.

Hex became one of the records most directly associated with the term "post-rock" itself, after a critic used it to describe the album's blend of rock instrumentation with textures borrowed from electronic and ambient music. Bark Psychosis effectively dissolved not long after the album's release, but Hex's patient, atmospheric approach — closer to a held breath than a rock record — became a reference point for the wider post-rock movement that took shape around the same term in the years that followed.