No Signal are an alternative rock band who hail from Colorado, USA. Combining youth with industry experience their new album Distorted Reality have just got them on my radar.

By Graeme Smith

Feature photo by Richard Cumming

Distorted Reality offers an immersive experience, unfolding over sixteen tracks and an hour and seventeen minutes. It’s one to clear your schedule for so you can get fully lost in its sonic journey. We begin with entropele, a slow-burning, piano-led meditation that builds Muse-like into an orchestral rock arrangement. It’ll get your blood pumping and make you hungry for what’s to come.

Jane is a lot heavier, with big riffs and and an urgent tempo. It rises and falls nicely. Euclidean Sunrise is a quieter moment. It’s short and brooding. C&B is wonderfully atmospheric, with a Gothic darkness to it. Embers takes things in an experimental direction with distorted vocals and electronic textures. Prelude is an eerie vignette. Transition A then sets up Phosphenes, an eleven-minute odyssey that takes its time to build through electronic layers and emotional vocals before hitting a hard rock climax. It then transitions into an intimate acoustic arrangement. It’s a highlight.

Cloud 1 opens the album’s second half in a contemplative yet bombastic fashion before P S D delivers some hypnotic melodies. Stranger keeps things hypnotic while introducing lively rock elements. Liminal is beautifully soulful. ? ? ? is bluesy and bass-y. Departing is raw and melancholic while Kiri is poetic and psychedelic. Title track Distorted Reality closes the album by going all out. Over fourteen minutes it gives us a microcosm of the No Signal sound.

No Signal have a 21-year-old frontman backed by a ten-time Grammy award winning team. The result is something exuberant but polished. Distorted Reality could well be one of the most exciting and ambitious albums in rock for a long time. No Signal are definite ones to watch. You can check out their album below.