Bus Gas - Mercy View (2025)

Mercy View is the first album from noise collective Bus Gas in seven years. A welcome return, it is a haunting and immersive sonic journey that expertly blends the worlds of drone, ambient, and post-rock into a scorching, melancholic whole. At nearly an hour in length, this seven-track, two-sided project is an atmospheric exploration through darkness and brightness. The alienation of solitude contrasted against the healing components of community.

Acting as a follow-up to their 2018 split album Immortal Yeller / Mountains Past, Mercy View finds Bus Gas collaborating once again with Portland-based ambient artist Amulets, whose analog, tape-loop soundscapes weave through many of these tracks. Together, these creatives craft a densely burrowing, often disorienting environment. A world that feels both deeply personal and universally bleak.

There’s the sensation of wandering alone through the woods with a broken flashlight, of stumbling upon a mysterious séance in an isolated field. These images speak to the album’s core emotional center: dread, longing, and revenge against the slow march of time. The album’s tone is dark and often relentless, yes, but there are moments of tranquility, of floating, of calm.

The music of Mercy View is often cryptic and languid, yet undeniably heavy. The threads running throughout this instrumental album reflect this sense of instability and fragility, of trekking through unfamiliar terrain both external and internal. It’s a masterful mix of angelic and haunt. Spaced out compositions that feel as though they’re reaching toward the cosmos, only to collapse in on themselves under their own weight. There are moments of relief, where the music feels like a long sword catching the sun’s reflection and forming a brief, fractured rainbow, only to zoom out and discover an environment of layered chaos. I can't help but think of the 2018 film Mandy. Searing cosmic pinks sinking next to pools of blood.

Mercy View is a disquieting sonic landscape with a strange kind of comfort. Like a heavy blanket of distortion that wraps around the listener, both protecting and unsettling them. The tape hiss, the looped textures, the creeping distortions. They all work together to pull the listener into an increasingly extraterrestrial and cinematic world, one that feels distant yet deeply familiar. In Mercy View, Bus Gas and Amulets have crafted something achingly beautiful and relentlessly bleak, a listening experience that lingers long after the final track fades into silence.