Abronia
Today, February 18th, Portland based band Abronia have shared “Mirrored Ends of Light,” the latest track from their forthcoming album Shapes Unravel, due February 20th via Cardinal Fuzz & Feeding Tube Records. The brooding track is consumed by haunting pedal steel, blood-pumping dynamics, and chilling atmospherics, a fantastic final preview of the band’s trademark psychedelia.
Over the past decade, Abronia has been refining their singular blend of widescreen psychedelia, desert noir, Eastern drone, avant-jazz, doom, post-punk, and acid-folk—channeling something that feels at once ritualistic and cinematic. From the first thud of their 32-inch bass drum to the coil of pedal steel winding through the haze, the sound of this Portland-based six-piece is unmistakable. Shapes Unravel is Abronia’s most ambitious and compositionally daring record to date—the album moves with a strange gravitational pull, layering grief, haunted memory, and flashes of transcendence into something emotionally expansive and structurally bold. Moments of crushing weight give way to eerie stillness, held together by an urgency that feels vital, not calculated. It’s a record that doesn’t politely wait for your attention; it pulls you into its orbit whether you’re ready or not.
“Mirrored Ends of Light” deals with memory, loss, and the cyclical nature of addiction. How did you approach translating such a personal, lived experience into something that could exist communally within the band and resonate with listeners?
ABRONIA: Abronia collectively writes the music. Sometimes someone comes in with a riff and then we improvise on said riff and then will listen to our practice recordings and refine from there. Often when we are jamming on a new song I will just make up nonsense words or say words that I feel like work within an improvised context. I never really know what is going to come out.
I’ll listen back to recordings and hear some words that I find interesting or perhaps Eric or another band member will say “Oh hey, that sounds like this word or phrase” or “I really like how you were repeating that word or phrase there”. I often try not to think about anything in the moment and I try to feel the music to help me set a tone or an idea for the song lyrically.
“Mirrored Ends of Light” might be a prequel to “Walker’s Dead Birds,” if you will. This was the last new song of mine that my loved one had listened to right before he passed. I would often play him recordings from band practice while driving around the city. He would give me his opinion on new songs we were working on. We loved talking about music and he would give me honest feedback. He was in and out of my life due to his addiction issues and we would take walks together on a local butte in town.
On the top of the butte there is an old walnut grove that we would walk through and perhaps that imagery stuck with me when imagining the lyrics in this song. I had picked up some of the walnut husks from that walk, which was the last walk I went on with him right before he passed but at the time I didn’t know it would be our last. The walnut husks lived in my car for awhile and I would see them after he had passed and perhaps subconsciously they were a reminder of walking with him on that butte.
I think the song is about our relationship and its complexity and ultimately the demise of it. It is about addiction and bearing witness to the “Ground Hog’s Day” reality of addiction. It was strange playing the song for him as I didn’t really tell him what the lyrics were about but I’m sure he somehow intuited what they were about. I did not hide my thoughts about his addiction from him.
The imagery of walking through the walnut grove and the repetition implied in the song feels almost ritualistic. How did place and repetition shape the structure and emotional pacing of the track?
ABRONIA: I would like to say that there is some intentional ritual here but I guess the only intentional ritual is the need to take walks in nature and so naturally a place to do that is in a park near your house.
While we were writing this song I was listening to Catherine Ribeiro + Alpes. I played their music for the rest of the band as a musical reference. The first time we played it live my friend Alan said “Hey, do you listen to Catherine Ribeiro? That one song reminded me of her.” I was excited that he could hear her influence in our music.
It’s hard to say if the imagery of the lyrics influenced the emotional pacing. I think the collective emotion of the band sets the pacing honestly. Music is a pretty intuitive language and it’s pretty cool that I get to speak that language with my bandmates.
This was the first song completed for the album but carries some of its heaviest emotional weight. In hindsight, how did finishing ‘Mirrored Ends of Light’ early on influence the emotional or sonic direction of Shapes Unravel as a whole?
ABRONIA: It’s really hard for us to predict as a band where our record is going to head. For me “Mirrored Ends of Light” is an ending even though it was the first song of our new record. The rest of the songs on the album came to fruition after he had passed. So there is a definite demarcation of sorts between this song and the rest of the songs on the album.
“Walker’s Dead Birds” speaks to the grief of someone who has passed. When I wrote the lyrics of “Mirrored Ends of Light” I had no idea he was going to die two weeks after I played him the song. I knew that death was a very possible thing for him but there is a denial or rather some kind of hope that it will happen way later than sooner. I struggled being in his life because of this undeniable truth. His addiction might very well kill him. So I’m not sure how this song sonically influenced the rest of the album other than I was going through one of the toughest moments we as humans have to face which is losing someone we deeply care about to something that we have no control over.
Perhaps the rest of the album is expressing grief and “Mirrored Ends of Light” is the prelude…
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