An echo from the great beyond, or perhaps just from a forgotten basement in Toronto, has arrived.

After a quarter-century pilgrimage through the underbelly of sound, Chlorine Dream has delivered its latest missive: ‘Not For Long.’ This is a psychic telegram from a world coming undone… acid-drenched blues crawl out from the earth, a fever dream you can’t wake up from… and according to Blake McCluskey: “Our bluesiest album to date. We have always had a passion for and deep respect of The Blues, and if you listen closely to our back catalogue, you can hear bluesy elements within those songs. However, ‘Not For Long’ is an album where, on three songs, we played Chlorine Dream’s psychedelic version of The Blues. This may be a direct result of the fact that three songs on the album were written in the guitar tuning of Open G, a tuning favoured by slide guitarists. The result is a grimier, swampier sound than our past albums.”

<a href="https://chlorinedream.bandcamp.com/album/not-for-long">Not For Long by Chlorine Dream</a>

The title track is a raw nerve, a haunting wail over the planet’s slow, deliberate suicide. Its accompanying visual is a slow-motion tapestry of beauty’s final moments, a film reel left to rot in the sun. The band, meanwhile, endures….a band of musical derelicts who have been sending their furious dispatches into the void since the century’s turn. Ryan Richardson’s return to the drums is a homecoming, a thunderous percussive ritual that sounds like four separate storms converging.

The album itself is grimy, a deliberate retreat from their previously more polished hallucinations. It has a swampy feel, as if the riffs were unearthed from the mud. The cover, a faded suburban photograph from their first demo, is drenched in the irony of a lifetime spent chasing this beautiful noise.