reviews / 2025

MAPPE OF - Afterglades

Name: MAPPE OF – Afterglades
Item: Afterglades
Rating: 7
Author: Marco Sgrignoli

2025 (Paper Bag)

folktronica, indie-folk, progressive folk

by Marco Sgrignoli

Staring down the barrel of a crisis

Carried on in spite of it

How did we become so blind in our visions

Become defined in 'em?

("Obsoloscenic")

If the intimate Bon Iver of "For Emma, Forever Ago" and the visionary one of "22, A Million" were two poles of the same magnetic field, "Afterglades" would sit right in between. A compass needle capable of pointing a way between the two extremes. Intimate yet open, close at hand and at the same time projected forward, the third album by 32-year-old Ontario musician Tom Meikle unfolds along a continuum running from the essential to the prismatic, folding electronics in as an expansion rather than a rupture.

Luminous melancholy and dystopia: visions of tomorrow to observe a present that keeps slipping away

Singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, sole figurehead of the Mappe Of project, Meikle returns after a long hiatus following the brilliant "A Northern Star, A Perfect Stone" (2018) and "The Isle of Ailynn" (2019), with a semi-concept post-apocalyptic in inspiration - but with moods charged with hope. The "Afterglades" of the title, literally something like "clearings after the fact", are spaces of possibility, visions that look to the future in order to question the present. The lyrics thus move on a double register, everyday and speculative, as if the present were being observed from a tomorrow that has already filed it away: an oblique yet familiar gaze, and surprisingly empathetic.

Musically, the album lives on subtle balances. "Spiritguide" opens gently and enveloping, amid chiming acoustic arpeggios, orchestral flourishes and a luminous melancholy that gradually takes shape choral. "Happiness In The Singularity" instead unfolds over a broken folktronic rhythm, fueling its stop'n'go never rushed, accompanying lyrics suspended between domestic nostalgia and everyday science fiction:

Tripping through the flashbacks

Watching old tapes by the staircase [...]
Aimless in the archives 'til an android comes to wake me
Memories on a hard drive 'til a solar flare will erase me.

Between acoustic and digital, stretching time and space without raising the volume

The guitar is often the record's true expressive core: skeletal yet incisive phrasing, with a liquid angularity that recalls the tangles of post-rock acts like Gastr del Sol. On "Terraforming Moons" it coils in on itself in a near-solo with a Midwest emo flavor, finding in that very circular motion a surprising epic dimension. The verse of "Honeyhaze" is Americana stripped bare, closely following in the footsteps of Justin Vernon, while "Watching A Chrysalis Form" and "All That's Ever Mattered Is In This Greenhouse" flow into a slow, enveloping progressive folk that plays with the dilation of time rather than volume.

The contrasts, on the other hand, come to the surface in "A Scourge Laid Upon Earth", built on quiet/loud dynamics in which the rhythmic crescendo merges with a dense wall of granular, digitally saturated guitars, suspending the atmosphere between synthetic colors and a blinding natural light.

In the end, "Afterglades" works like an observatory: it looks ahead to better read the present, and studies distant scenarios to get to the bottom of what marks us most deeply. The writing always stays anchored to a human dimension, even when the sound becomes more mediated, more layered, more distant in appearance. It's in this unresolved tension – between memory and projection, between technology and lived experience – that the record finds its measure. It doesn't dissolve the ambiguities, but builds a laboratory to probe their ripples, fascinated.

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05/01/2026

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Marco Sgrignoli, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition