Torn Hawk: Through Force Of Will CS

New York musician Luke Wyatt describes his instrumental hypnagogic guitar guise Torn Hawk as “music of a noble fabric whose weave is flawed and frayed.” With a decade of hindsight, the looping beats, smeared synths, and grainy hooks of 2014’s Through Force Of Will have taken on a richer cast, like closing credits anthems to heroic 80’s films long since forgotten. From widescreen new wave (“I Am Returning”) and baggy psychedelia (“Palace Racket”) to shredded New Romanticism (“Streets On Fire”) and glassy shoegaze (“Blindsided”), the songs fuse victory and vulnerability, soaring solos and tape hiss. Wyatt characterizes the songs’ low fidelities and “distressed edges” as “intentional lace,” smudging outlines and degrading surfaces to carve out “more room to dream.” This 2024 memorial edition adds 25 minutes of unreleased vintage bonus material, expanding Torn Hawk's vision of “error and compression” across echo-soaked riffs, smoky synth fugues, and blazing technoid rock. Throughout, the music surges, yearns, and burns, unrestrained and undefeated, forever in pursuit of Wyatt’s mission to lift the listener from “the cave of loneliness to the amphitheater of self-love.”