Explosions in the Sky: All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone

The title is perfect. All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone. It describes a feeling that is hard to name — the sudden, overwhelming awareness of absence, of all the people who are not here, of all the moments that have already passed. It is a feeling that arrives without warning, usually at the worst possible time.

Explosions in the Sky have always been good at naming feelings that are hard to name. Their fourth album, released in 2007, is perhaps their most direct expression of that gift.

The Road to 2007

By 2007, Explosions in the Sky were one of the most celebrated bands in post-rock. Their 2003 album The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place had brought them to a wider audience, and their soundtrack work — most notably for the film Friday Night Lights — had introduced them to listeners who might never have sought out instrumental guitar music.

All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone was made in the aftermath of that success, and it shows. The band sounds confident — not in a showy way, but in the way of musicians who know exactly what they are doing and have stopped worrying about whether it is the right thing.

The Sound

The sonic palette of All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone is broader than anything Explosions in the Sky had done before. There are more textures, more layers, more willingness to let a piece develop slowly and unpredictably.

The opening track, The Birth and Death of the Day, is a perfect example. It begins with a single guitar figure — simple, almost folk-like — and builds over eight minutes into something vast and complex. The build is patient and inevitable, like watching a storm develop on the horizon.

It's Natural to Be Afraid is the most emotionally direct piece on the album — a slow, aching piece that does exactly what its title suggests. So Long, Lonesome has a quality of farewell that is hard to account for technically but impossible to miss emotionally.

The Guitar Work

Explosions in the Sky are, at their core, a guitar band. Munaf Rayani, Mark Smith, and Michael James play three guitars, and the interplay between them is the central element of the music.

What makes their guitar work distinctive is not technical virtuosity — though they are all skilled players — but the way they use the guitar as a melodic and textural instrument simultaneously. The guitars on All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone are often playing multiple roles at once: carrying the melody, providing harmonic support, and creating texture through the use of effects and volume swells.

The volume swells — a technique where the guitarist uses the volume knob to create a note that fades in rather than attacks — are particularly characteristic. They give the music a quality of emergence, as if the sounds are appearing from silence rather than being played into it.

The Texas Landscape

Like Boards of Canada and Scotland, or Sigur Rós and Iceland, Explosions in the Sky are inseparable from their geography. They are from Austin, Texas, and the landscape of central Texas — the wide skies, the flat plains, the dramatic storms — is present in their music even when it is not explicitly referenced.

All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone sounds like Texas at dusk. It sounds like the specific quality of light in the hour before sunset, when everything is golden and slightly melancholy and the day is clearly ending but has not yet ended.

This is not a metaphor. It is a description of what the music sounds like.

The Emotional Register

What distinguishes Explosions in the Sky from many of their post-rock contemporaries is the specificity of their emotional register. Their music is not generically sad or generically uplifting. It is sad in specific ways, and uplifting in specific ways, and the specificity is what makes it moving.

All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone is a record about loss — not dramatic loss, not tragedy, but the ordinary, accumulating loss of time passing and people moving away and moments that cannot be recovered. It is a record about the feeling that gives the album its title.

At Noctua FM, we play Explosions in the Sky in the hours when that feeling is most likely to arrive — late at night, when the day is over and the next one has not yet begun, and the silence is full of everyone who is not there.