The starting point was all too ominous, spelled out in plain sight. Beginning with their 2015 debut, Further Out, the earliest works of Cloakroom felt like you were floating inside of the god particle, completely stoned and numb to your surroundings. The atmosphere? Dense, bleak, and heavy in spite of the Indiana post-shoegaze band’s gravity defiance. It’s no wonder it eventually led them to places beyond this Earth itself to disconnect from it all on 2022’s cowboy space odyssey, Dissolution Wave.

After a three-year orbit away from this world, the band’s fourth studio effort, Last Leg of the Human Table, is a concentrated effort to reground themselves onto more terrestrial surroundings, and at that, realizing Cloakroom’s most concrete-sounding form to date. This Earth’s atmosphere which they reenter through just isn’t the same one they left, though, and don’t we all know it. Societal decay and existential quandaries on the daily have many pondering what human connection looks like when everything once golden has now faded in its luster, and reality is a splintered non-consensus. The oddity feeling of returning some place familiar that’s now rather alien resonates within their sonic reconfiguration.

But instead of letting it swallow them into a deeper vacuum, vocalist and guitarist Doyle Martin, bassist Bobby Markos, and drummer Timothy Remis are racing black holes by ripping through them with hook-powered highlights like with “Ester Wind”, “Unbelonging”, and “Story of the Egg”, fusing shoegaze friction and elemental punk minimalism that’s spiritually made from the same blissed stardust carried out from the galaxy that gave us Nothing’s Tired of Tomorrow and Pity Sex’s Hot White Moon. Rather than meandering in the looming heavy plumes of doom, they let the heavy get spaced out psychedelically with escape tracks like “The Pilot” and “The Lights Are On”.

Any comedowns abound still offer proof that Cloakroom’s flotational matter is alive at their core, and though they may be looking up toward the heavens from down here, dreamcasted (Mid)western elegies for the start of end times on “Bad Larry” and “On Joy and Undeserving” keep them skygazing even if the horizon is diminishing. As it turns out, the lasting effects of far out space travel haven’t completely left their bodies. They’ve just brought them down to Earth.

Highlights: “Unbelonging”, “The Light Are On”, “Story of the Egg”

Cloakroom’s Last Leg of the Human Table is available now on Closed Casket Activities.

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