Bogatyri

Departure Songs was written after the suicide of We Lost The Sea vocalist Chris Torpy in 2013. The Australian band — devastated, facing an obvious question about whether to continue — chose to continue, and to make an album entirely instrumental, and to dedicate each track to a specific act of human sacrifice: people who gave their lives for others in ways that history has largely forgotten.

“Bogatyri” tells the story of three Soviet divers — Alexei Ananenko, Valeri Bespalov, and Boris Baranov — who volunteered to wade into the flooded, radioactively contaminated basement of Chernobyl Reactor 4 in May 1986 to open drainage valves that would prevent a second, potentially catastrophic steam explosion. They wore wetsuits. They had flashlights. They had no guarantee of survival, and they went anyway.

The music begins with a bassline that one reviewer described as “Twin Peaks walking into absolute darkness” — hypnotic, foreboding, the perfect sonic representation of three men putting on their gear and descending into water that is trying to kill them. The instrumentation builds with relentless logic: guitar layers accumulating, the rhythm section intensifying, the whole architecture moving toward a climax that represents the divers in the radioactive water.

They found the valves. They opened them. They walked back out. All three survived. The steam explosion was prevented. The disaster that was averted would have been worse than Chernobyl itself.

The climax of “Bogatyri” swells and then decays — the music representing the half-life of both radiation and memory, the way historical sacrifices diminish in collective consciousness while remaining permanent in their effects. This is what post-rock can do that words alone cannot: enact the emotional arc of a story rather than merely describing it.

We Lost The Sea are genuinely obscure. Departure Songs is world-class. Find it.