New Music: Octavian Winters – By The Stars

San Francisco’s Octavian Winters find new ground between the gothic shoegaze of Cocteau Twins and melodic post-punk on By The Stars.

The band often explores the further reaches of post-punk in their music, and the rhythm section of the song largely comes from that direction, brooding in tone before smoothly progressing to a lighter feel, and then back.

Ria Aursjoen’s vocals are more than equal to the task of mastering those tonal shifts: at times ethereal, then doomily romantic, like listening to an angel falling to earth and becoming almost mortal. It leaves the song in an enviable place, as likely to appeal to fans of The Cure as it is to those who love Drab Majesty, a testament to the band’s skill at making the breaking of boundaries sound so natural.

Says Ria Aursjoen, who is also the band’s lyricist, “[By The Stars] has the feel of a sea voyage. The images for me were always ones of the vastness of the sky and the sea, and the feeling of the magnificent beauty of the world. The call-and-answer vocals are like two people calling back and forth across a valley. It’s meant to encompass that feeling of transcendence when you take a meta view of life and of the natural world, and just fall into the beautiful patterns of it all.”

Adds the Octavian Winters drummer Randy Gzebb about the impact the song has had when performed live: “I remember playing an all-ages show in Northern California, looked up mid-song and saw these two young goth girls at the front of the stage with tears streaming down their faces. That moment told me everything I needed to know about ‘By the Stars’. You know a song matters when it reaches people like that.”

Octavian Winters play the iconic Wave-Gotik-Treffen festival in Germany on the 22nd of May and will appear at Absolution Fest at The Orpheum in Tampa, Florida, this October. The band has recently been working with producer William Faith on their sophomore EP, which is set for release this summer.

By The Stars is out now on Stratis Capta Records and can be heard on Bandcamp and Spotify. For details of festival appearances and to be among the first to know about upcoming releases, follow Octavian Winters on Facebook or Instagram.

Header image by David Kruschke