Style: Post-rock, post-metal (Clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: If These Trees Could Talk, Russian Circles, Lost in Kyiv
Country: Sweden
Release date: 5 June 2026

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What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.

— T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

If you’re not familiar with this poem, you might not realize how challenging T. S. Eliot’s modernist poem The Waste Land is for a layperson to engage with. Although it opens with passages like the one above with its beautiful usage of language to paint bleak imagery—in a tone likely familiar to fans of post-metal—the later stanzas devolve into a fragmented confusion of references to literature, mythology, religious texts, and assorted nursery rhymes, bouncing between scenes of heavy abstraction and of impenetrably concrete specificity. The effect of all these components is to render the words’ surface level meaning almost void; whatever connection can be found between the disparate parts arises only from their proximity to each other and the tiny grains of authorial intent that scholars can divine from accompanying sources.¹

Did I just write a whole paragraph without even once mentioning the album I’m reviewing? Yes, yes I did, and that’s exactly the kind of off-topic discussion that befits a work like The Waste Land. Although truthfully, And The Dead Tree Gives No Shelter has relatively little to do with Eliot aside from the title reference and the beautifully empty vibes. Oh Hiroshima play a very cinematic form of post-rock tinged with acrid, coppery metal, straightforward in its compositional structure but complex in its layered, atmospheric instrumentation. With the addition of a wide range of extra instrumentation (and a guest list almost as long as The Waste Land itself), And The Dead Tree… becomes their most varied and nuanced composition yet. The songwriting incorporates few explicitly progressive elements—most tracks stick closely to basic 3/4 and 4/4 time signatures, for example—but the band produce a brain-tickling depth of sound from all the usual components plus strings, keyboards, brass, saxophone, and even a church organ.

The majority of the album, including opener “Servant of All” and the exquisite atmospheres of “Meridian” and “Broken Sunlight,” follows the familiar core cinematic post-rock construction. Small departures from the primary formula add flavor and variety, like the guest vocals from Ellen Vingren on “Angelos” forming a touching duet with primary vocalist Jakob Hemström. These varied flourishes help to build out distinct characteristics for each track, but struggle to completely break free from the simple compositional structures which make up most of the runtime. Meanwhile, “Ivory Town” (a rare all-instrumental feature for the band) showcases mournful cello amidst beautiful scenery, adding to the tragic feeling which suffuses And The Dead Tree…. Closing track “Exit Cloud” marks the biggest achievement for Oh Hiroshima, fusing their typical presentation style with the same varied guest components that comprise the rest of the album. On top of an overall great presentation of post-rock in general, the finale features numerous clever shifts in tone and a wealth of unexpected elements like the wailing saxophone barely recognizable beneath hazy effects. Even setting aside the connections to modernist literature, And The Dead Tree Gives No Shelter remains an accomplished work of art in its own right. But what does it all mean?

In an interview with Idioteq, Oh Hiroshima’s guitarist and singer Jakob Hemström revealed that the album wasn’t written in a singular effort, but instead contains numerous tracks composed years ago, some of them originally for a different project entirely. “Tree of Life” is one of the few tracks (or possibly the only track) written with this album in mind, and certainly its underlying folksy guitar rhythm stands out distinctly from the other works. The result is an unusual fusion of elements from all throughout Oh Hiroshima’s history (and even the musicians’ histories outside the band itself). Although disjointed, this experience still manages to evoke strong emotions at each turn—a modernist, unbounded approach that mirrors what proponents appreciate about The Waste Land. In the same interview, he also had this to say about the meaning behind And The Dead Tree…’s conception:

Hemström uses the dead tree as a metaphor for ways of living that drain the world of meaning and offer nothing to fall back on. “We are living in a time when it has become harder and harder to imagine a bright future,” he says.

“This leaves many of us with a deep sense of hopelessness that easily breeds cynicism and apathy. In that state it becomes easy to shut the world out and give up any attempts at meaningful interaction with the world around us. A destructive cycle follows, as this leaves us with no way of sheltering ourselves from our initial despair at the state of things. But these songs also aim to paint something meaningful and hopeful.”

Even now, roughly a century later, artists highlight the same despair felt across society that shone so strongly in Eliot’s works. Although we mourn the aftermaths (and continuations) of different wars, the eternal existence of war at all ignites the same dread for how our futures can ever recover. Art is timeless: the same anxieties for today and hopes for tomorrow recur time and time again throughout eras and movements, and until we can address them more thoroughly, pieces like And The Dead Tree Gives No Shelter and its great uncle The Waste Land will continue to galvanize their audiences.

And The Dead Tree Gives No Shelter may not be nearly as impenetrable as its namesake, but the ties between the two works remind us of the complexity of interpretation behind all art. Like The Waste Land, Oh Hiroshima’s latest album combines fragments of meaning from numerous disparate periods. The result is just as much a collage of impressions, references, and influences, but also just as much an emotional painting expressing an abstract mix of the artist’s fears, ideals, and messages to the world. This collage hews quite close to Oh Hiroshima’s established brand of cinematic post-rock, but individual guest contributions and the overall array of musical styles drawn from different eras of the band members’ careers (plus an especially stellar final track) help provide noteworthy and memorable features. The Dead Tree may not be a modernist marvel to be pored over by academics for a century to come, but its expressive and varied presentation offer a trove of insights into the present-day emotional experiences of artists and audiences alike—and that’s all it has to be.

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Recommended tracks: Meridian, Skeleton Key, Broken Sunlight, Exit Cloud
You may also like: Ikaiora; The Sun Burns Bright; Shy, Low; Molecules to Minds
Final verdict: 7/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Label: Pelagic Records

Oh Hiroshima is:
– Jakob Hemström (guitars, vocals)
– Oskar Nilsson (drums)
With guests:
– Jarl Furingsten (piano, guitars, church organ)
– Joakim Liebgott (vocals)
– Kristian Karlsson (synths)
– Antoni Yammin (double bass)
– Anders Hemström (trumpet)
– Arvid Ageborg (trombone)
– Ellen Vingren (vocals)
– Hanna Ekström (violin)
– Ellen Hemström (cello)
– Samuel Muntlin (saxophone)

1. I’m not an Eliot scholar by any means, so please don’t mistake this summary for academic critique. That said, I challenge you to find an average poetry enjoyer who wouldn’t react the same way. ↩︎