Slate

In Wales, there are lines of poetry that are passed down like an heirloom by the poet Brian Harris: “To be born in Wales, not with a silver spoon in your mouth but with music in your blood, and poetry in your soul, is a privilege indeed.” Emerging from the depths of Cardiff’s burgeoning music scene, heirs to their country’s lineage of storytellers, are Slate. The four-piece band are barely touching their twenties, but together, they have a command of post-punk which rings with the gravitas of a death-knell; a grasp atmosphere and melody which is altogether otherworldly.

Their debut EP, Deathless, is an act of immersion and a vivid act of storytelling. Recorded in a single take, each track is a reaction to another, balancing the scales between the warring forces of light and shade, melody and ferocity, which their music strives to unite. Slate’s intention was writ large with introductory single ‘Tabernacl’, dreamt up when vocalist Jack Shephard and drummer Raychi Bryant were driving in the middle of the night down endless country roads. An anxiety bleeds into its propulsive rhythm, a white-knuckled intensity which mirrors how it feels to push on blindly through the dark. It’s a sensation which bassist Lauren Edwards and guitarist Elis Penri painted to completion: the inky terrain which Jack’s haunted incantations of regret and repentance are doomed to wander.

The four each come from disparate worlds as musicians, and with Slate, these experiences converge in interesting ways. What bonded them was the written word, playing poetry games over pints in Cardiff. Together, they found an affinity for the surreal works of Arthur Rimbaud and the Welsh poets R. S Thomas and Dylan Thomas, whose reverence for their country and its people bleeds into Slate’s lyrics. Their second single, ‘St Agatha’, reckoned with Welsh identity with the story of people buried at the border: their heads in the homeland, their feet in England – forever conflicted and severed from where they belong. Slate are writing a new stanza in the Welsh cultural identity. Something ancient is kept alight.