Pilots unleash their album “Eyes On The Horizon”, and frankly, the horizon it scans seems littered with emotional debris rather than gentle dawns. This Surrey outfit belts out anthemic alt-rock that promises soaring heights, yet dives headfirst into the messy, often bruising territory of love gone sour and the exhausting climb back to oneself. It’s a curious concoction, like finding shards of stained glass in a gravel pit – surprisingly sharp, unexpectedly beautiful in flashes.
The sound is undeniably big. Huge, even. Guitars crunch and swell, choruses erupt with the kind of force designed to pin you to the back wall. Yet, lyrically, we’re knee-deep in confusion, regret, the particular hollowness that follows a severed connection. They sing of love as a blinding, sometimes cruel force, mapping its fallout with a passion that feels almost defiant. There’s a relentless quality here, a refusal to just fade out, even when the words speak of weariness and the sheer effort required to just “come alive.”
It’s that friction that grabs you. The juxtaposition of stadium-sized hooks with intimate, sometimes uncomfortable admissions of weakness. One minute, you’re caught in a wave of pure sonic power; the next, a line about struggling to let go snags on your thoughts like burrs on wool. Occasionally, a particular distorted chord progression would shimmer oddly, reminding me, quite inexplicably, of the way sunlight refracts through cheap plastic – a momentarily dazzling, slightly artificial rainbow against the surrounding storm clouds. It’s modern rock muscle flexing around a heart that’s clearly taken a few knocks.
They channel that classic alt-rock energy, certainly, but filter it through a very contemporary lens of anxiety and uncertain futures. It’s loud, it’s raw, it pounds relentlessly. After spinning through these ten tracks of cathartic noise and carefully articulated pain, you’re left energised, perhaps a little wrung out. Is the horizon they’re focused on one of eventual peace, or just the next inevitable storm?
