Ten years is a long time to wait for a record. If These Trees Could Talk last put out a full album in 2016 with The Bones of a Dying World, and while a 2024 single briefly broke the silence, the question of whether a full return was coming hung over the band’s fanbase for a while. The Hidden Hand answers it.
The Akron, Ohio quintet have always operated with three guitars at their core, and co-founder Zack Kelly has described the arrangement in orchestral terms — bass covering the cello register, rhythm guitars holding the woodwind section, lead covering strings. On paper that sounds like a formula. In practice, across nine tracks, it holds the album together without ever feeling mechanical.
The record opens with “Archons,” a 113-second piece that functions less as a standalone song and more as an on-ramp. It bleeds directly into “Moon Machine,” the album’s longest track at nearly eight minutes, which does the heavy lifting of establishing the emotional register for everything that follows. The mood is solemn and deliberate — not punishing, but not comfortable either.
“Sea of Glass” brings some air into the room. The clean guitar work on it leans optimistic compared to what precedes it, though the track earns its heavier resolution before it’s done. “Blurry Creatures” is where things shift again — this is the one track on the record featuring vocals, if you can call them that. The voices belong to Kelly’s kids, recorded after the track was otherwise finished and nearly shelved. They were layered into a group chant to mirror a guitar phrase Kelly couldn’t get out of his head, and the result sits at the front and back of the song as more of a percussive element than a vocal performance. For a band that has turned down singers more than once over the course of two decades, it’s a notable moment — and a clever one, since it technically doesn’t break their instrumental constitution.
“Silence Between Mountains” splits across two movements, the first a brief atmospheric piece, the second a slower build that takes its time before resolving. “Metanoia” arrives as one of the album’s strongest moments, opening with a pulse before expanding into something more cinematic. The guitar solo draws obvious comparisons to David Gilmour-era Pink Floyd, and they’re fair ones.
“Flim” is an Aphex Twin cover, and it makes sense coming from this band — Kelly has cited the artist as a formative influence going back to the late ’90s, and the arrangement translates the original into the band’s guitar-driven register without gutting what made it work. The album closes on “Endlessly Connected,” a short, drum-free track that functions as a quiet exhale after the weight of what came before.
The Hidden Hand isn’t a reinvention. The band knows what they do well and they’ve done it again, with slightly more resolution in the emotional arc than their previous records. Whether that reads as maturity or restraint probably depends on what you came looking for. Either way, the wait was worth it.
Rating: 8/10
The Hidden Hand is out July 10 on Metal Blade Records.
I’m Drew, the founder and editor of Front of the Stage. I have a strong love for music and photography, which started at a very young age. There’s just something I love about experiencing live music and capturing memories that will last a lifetime, and that’s how Front of the Stage came to be.
