Brian Jin

A HUSH FALLING OVER THE WEST (2025 Josie Music Award Nominee) is a razor-sharp, eight-song dispatch from a civilization in quiet collapse. Part protest, part autopsy, part fever dream, this album stares straight into the dying glow of the West and refuses to blink. No sermons, no saviors—just unflinching sociopolitical observation set to a soundtrack that shifts from snarling alt-rock and metallic crunch to eerie folk minimalism, synth-drenched paranoia, and late-night orchestral ache.

At its core is the liner-note fable “The King and the Gold”—a darkly comic allegory of fiat money, endless war, and a people tricked into dying for paper—that casts a long shadow over every track. From the sardonic anthem “Fine By Me” (imagine the house lights coming up while the building burns) to the numb, hypnotic warning of the title phrase in “Soma,” the record chronicles distraction, surveillance, betrayal, desire, and the strange hush that settles when everyone’s too exhausted or afraid to speak.

Standouts include the paranoid stomp of “Cash (Big Black Vans),” the bruised intimacy of “Undressing Beverly,” the carnal cosmology of “The Curvature Of Your Bones,” and the exhausted midnight drift of “Sleepdriving.” It closes with the bittersweet curtain call “Ladies & Gentlemen,” a gentle ushering-out that somehow feels like both farewell and threat.

Musically restless and lyrically merciless, A Hush Falling Over the West is the sound of three lifelong friends—Brian Kious, Nick Kladky, and Casey Wollberg—refusing to look away while everything familiar slips off its foundation. Turn it up. The silence is getting louder.