The Utopia Strong International Treasure

Call it synchronicity, call it happenstance, call it no more than three friends getting together to give their speakers a workout. Yet The Utopia Strong's formidable conflagration of psychedelic radiance and beatific harmony has evolved way beyond all or any expectations since the band's inception at the start of 2018. The following year's Rocket debut was a powerful document of kosmische transcendence fit to banish all or any talk of its originators' collective histories firmly into the background.

Yet it's clear now that this triumvirate were barely getting started. International Treasure chronicles the collaborative collision of Steve Davis, Kavus Torabi and Mike York heading into unchartered psychic territory, seemingly with nothing but their instincts as co-ordinates. What's resulted is a step beyond anything either band or audience might have expected - a deeply rewarding voyage into inner space which moves into darker and still more evocative sound-worlds whilst remaining fundamentally off the map.

The aural epiphanies herein traverse on a hallucinatory trajectory from blissed out (the incantatory spiral of "Persephone Sleeps" and the arcadian lilt of "Shepherdess") to ominous and unearthly (as in the case of the overcast ambience of "Disaster 2" and the non-Euclidean geometry of album centerpiece "Revelations") before arriving at a rapturous conclusion with the gloriously balearic end-credit euphoria of "Castalia."