Songs rarely come with a history pamphlet attached—Bleak’s “newest” single, The Wave, is not one of those songs. Released just last May, The Wave is actually one of the band’s oldest creations. Or rather, the oldest creation of its frontman and guitarist, Caleb Daniel Lit. The Wave’s strange history is a mirror to Bleak’s own, or rather a ‘Temporal anchor’, as Caleb himself calls it.
Bleak initially emerged in the late 90s, in the Northern Finnish city Rovaniemi, but true to its birth city, its story follows a turbulent, non-linear progress. Promising a darkly Nordic twist to Sheol, Bleak didn’t live long enough to deliver. Though it has garnered a modest fanbase, the band went off on the wrong foot, creating music closer to a masquerade of the giants inspiring it, rather than original music that leaves its own mark. Problems accumulated as guitarists came and went, each a more questionable choice than the previous one. Ultimately, the band collapsed and Caleb went on trying his hand, not unsuccessfully, elsewhere.
A promising project left unfinished, however, is a haunting spectre, as any artist would know. And Caleb eventually returned to rebuild Bleak with its original guitarist, returning in time to the moment before it all went wrong to kill baby Hitler. By 2024, Bleak had officially built itself anew.
The risks are endless with such a project—we’re no longer in the 90s and haunting specters don’t always function as well when brought back from death. Daringly, Caleb adds to those risks by not just reassembling the band, but having its official comeback single, a song even older than the band.
A choice that turns out to be a well-made one. The quick intro drives the listener head-first into pure grit. With a sense of pregnant urgency, The Wave’s raw power is easily its most identifiable element: audible in the quick-fire solo alternation between the two guitarists and the straining vocals of Caleb. The Wave is, essentially, everything Original Bleak wasn’t: visceral, unpolished, unsanitized. The force behind the song is a stripped-down maturity that might have been lacking if the song came out two decades ago.
All in all, aside from some questionable choices, like a misplaced generic Middle Eastern melody riffing through Caleb’s vocals and the undeniably rich, texture-full guitars, The Wave is a promising gesture that this time things just might take a different turn for Bleak.
