Blight

On June 7, 2023, the sky over New York turned orange. Millions of people peered upward to find the air thick with acrid smoke, the smell of wildfires having drifted south from Canada. As far as climate disruptions go, this was considerably more alarming than warm weather in November but not as imminently threatening as fire tearing through your city. For many East Coasters, it was just plain surreal. The sky was smoky-thick and golden-hued, and, strangest of all, the drudgery of daily life just carried on.

“Something in the Air,” the second single from the Antlers’ new album, Blight, describes that environmental event, or one seemingly much like it. If the Antlers have accrued a sometimes-unfair reputation as a “sad” band, the song’s dirgelike, minor-key pall won’t change anyone’s mind. “Oh, keep your window closed today,” Peter Silberman, the project’s longtime leader, sings in a high, keening voice. But instead of capturing the surreal spectacle of such an event, or confronting its frightening implications, the song wallows in banality: “Oh, be sure to charge your phone today/Oh, maybe work from home today,” the singer croons.

Since their career breakthrough, the Antlers have been known for a kind of musical mourning that doesn’t shy away from hard emotions. “Shiva,” “Wake,” “Putting the Dog to Sleep”—those are just a few fitting titles you might find on a starter playlist. Long associated with a rousing attempt to reckon with private grief—namely, 2009’s blog-era breakout Hospice, which used a cancer ward as a setting for wrenching songs about a disintegrating relationship—Silberman now turns his gaze to a more collective grief. “Eco-grief,” to be clinically accurate. Blight, the group’s seventh album, is billed as a song cycle about the climate crisis. Its nine songs simmer with dread about pollution (“Pour,” “Calamity”), complacency (“Consider the Source”), and the specter of ecological catastrophe (“A Great Flood”). But the slow, sorrowful material rarely summons the urgency this subject demands, nor the emotional catharsis that rippled through Silberman’s best work.

Silberman conceived much of the album during long walks on the land surrounding his home studio in upstate New York. At some point, he noticed a neighboring farmer was cutting down woods to clear a path for his vehicles. Songs like “Carnage,” a minimal synth-and-voice piece that sprouts into a full-band meltdown, reckon with the collateral damage of such destruction and teem with intriguing imagery: a headless snake, a toad flattened by a car tire. “Accidental damage,” Silberman sings as the song climaxes in a satisfyingly gnarly guitar solo. The title track summons a similar specificity in its visions of environmental decline (“chawed up trees with skeletal leaves”). It also hints at the songwriter’s recent interest in electronic music, as skittering drum loops, played by longtime drummer Michael Lerner, weave through the track’s back half, morphing and shifting like a biological mutation.

That sense of grit and immediacy is missing from longer tracks like “Something in the Air” and “Deactivate,” shapeless pieces built around stately, boring arpeggios and weepy vocals. On previous records, the Antlers favored slow, ethereal textures but still managed to convey life-or-death stakes, with occasional explosions of cathartic release. Here, the band stares down environmental catastrophe but manages to arouse little more than a sorrowful sigh.

Throughout this album, Silberman seems preoccupied with questions of who’s to blame for our climate disaster. He assigns some of the fault to himself, or ordinary consumers like him, people who buy and toss disposable goods daily without thinking too much about where it all goes. Some liberal guilt is warranted and undoubtedly well-meaning, but it doesn’t breed especially interesting lyrics. “Is it enough to add to cart with buyer’s remorse?/Well, if you don’t know where to start, consider the source,” he croons on “Consider the Source,” a pretty opener that evokes the soulful glow of 2021’s Green to Gold. A few songs later, the opening verse of “Blight” addresses similar territory, with a touch more scorn: “Quickly, I need it!/Shipped in a day/Oceans away.” The critique is literal and blunt.

The self-examination is admirable but also feels a bit puzzling on an album that has less scorn for the rapacious corporations, oil billionaires, and climate-denying politicians who betrayed the planet for profit. Do everyday consumers bear some of the blame for environmental destruction? Sure, of course. But there are real villains behind the climate crisis and, in my opinion, they are not random Amazon shoppers or working artists eking out a living in upstate New York. They are the greedy capitalist forces Tamara Lindeman of The Weather Station evoked hauntingly on 2021’s “Robber,” from the similarly themed Ignorance. Any reckoning with those mightier forces is conspicuously absent from the Antlers’ societal critique.

Maybe my frustration is that Blight feels like a peculiarly apolitical album about a subject that is inherently political, especially in 2025, a year that has seen the gutting of the E.P.A. and massive cuts to the National Park Service by a science-denying president and his noxious cronies. There’s some anger and blame rippling through the album, but also a lot of non-committal ambivalence. Towards the end of Blight, on the sparse, hymn-like “A Great Flood,” Silberman wonders: “Of this I’m uncertain/Will we be forgiven?” Another question hangs in the wildfire-scented air: Who’s we?

The Antlers: Blight

$27 at Rough Trade

$30 at Amazon