From the Eyrie is Bewilder’s debut LP, but in a lot of ways, it feels like their first proper release. The duo of vocalist/guitarist George Brooks and multi-instrumentalist Thom Wilkinson have been playing as Bewilder for over a decade now. Yet, From the Eyrie feels fresh with the urgency of a young band’s first demo tape balanced with the precision and maturity that only time together can cultivate. Where the band's previous EPs might have been considered promising but perhaps undeveloped, From the Eyrie takes a more sophisticated approach and feels complete and fully formed.

The seeds that would blossom into From the Eyrie were sown in 2019 when Brooks and Wilkinson began sending each other demos–they’d always operated this way, sending tracks back and forth, so when COVID hit and everything locked down, their process wasn’t disrupted. In fact, things began speeding up. “Twin Lakes” was finished in May 2020, and both agreed the bar had been set for what a Bewilder song could be. When they heard the full demo of the track, violins and all, they set out to make a record as full-bodied and layered as possible. For Brooks, who’d grown up on classic emo bands like American Football, the goal was to make something that tapped into those feelings without retreading old ground.

To be sure, there are those reference points–American Football, Mineral, Carissa’s Wierd–but the whole is far more than the sum of its influences. The strings that flesh out the single “Breaking” give it a feeling entirely its own, and while the cascading arpeggios that open “Heavy Sweater” might call other bands to mind, there’s a warmth to these songs that sets them apart from anything else in the emo canon. Maybe it’s Wilkinson’s background in folk music that does it, his fixation on the pastoral and naturalistic. It colors “Home,” for sure, a song that mixes the sparse acoustics of traditional folk music with the jangling and twinkling of emo. “That’s the song with the most nostalgic feeling,” the band notes, the song that best sums up the album’s twin themes of nature and nostalgia. “My childhood holidays were remote places in the UK,” Brooks shares, “so my safest place is in nature.” And From the Eyrie captures the feeling of being awed by rolling hills, lush fields, and seemingly never-ending oceans that so accompanies childhood. These aren’t just songs about childlike feelings of wonder; they embody those feelings. “We’re made up of little parts of everyone we’ve ever known,” Brooks sings at the start of the record, “and every time we make a new friend we re-assess what we can change.” Right upfront he gives the mission statement of the record, both thematically and musically. From the Eyrie has the comfort of a record you’ve loved your whole life in a package that feels wholly new.