Post rock is a strange beast. While there’s no shortage of climax-chasing, effect-laden, instrumental guitar bands, it can sometimes feel like very few post rock acts are able to use that template to create authentically engaging music. Most of them are just boring.

But BLAK isn’t most bands.

There’s nothing necessarily groundbreaking about this Catalonian outfit’s debut. All of the typical post rock flavors are here—tremolo guitar lines, angular drum lines, soundtrack-ready arrangements, huge walls of distortion…even the Darkness vs. Light themes of the song titles are typical post rock fare.

This could easily be mistaken for early Explosions in the Sky or Mono.  But Between Darkness and Light doesn’t just sound like those post rock legends—it stands eye-to-eye with them.

From the opening strains of “In the Absence of Light – Eigengrau” to the closing sighs of “Colors Awake – Perception,” this album checks every box in the post rock checklist.

And as is the case with post rock, many of those boxes could be turned to dismiss the music as well. The introspective song titles could be dismissed as pretentious. The long song structures (the shortest song is seven minutes long) could be read by some to be boring. Even as a post rock fan, you could really easily make the argument that they’re just ripping off Mogwai, like how Pitchfork dismissed every post rock album of the early 2000s as a rip off of Young Team.

But what really matters is how effectively the music moves you. And Between Darkness and Light is a masterful emotive narrative, commanding monumental emotional shifts using the power of their sonics alone. It’s a powerful album that is a worthy addition to the post rock canon.

And I’ll be honest: I originally bought this record due to the incredible colored marble on the vinyl pressing. The music was secondary to the packaging on this purchase.

And that gamble has paid off beautifully.