The location of the Red Palace on H Street, to paraphrase “Sh*t DC Says,” was impossibly far away from everything. The atmosphere was crowded, the two opening acts were subpar, and the Red Palace stage could barely contain a full band‰’s setup, with the room surrounding it about twice the size of your freshman dorm room. But nothing could diminish the surprisingly powerful sounds of post-rock outfit This Will Destroy You.

Their music starts with something small: a simple harmony on the lead guitar, a chord or two on a Rhodes stage keyboard, or maybe a digitized beat. Then the voice of that guitar rises into a melodic line that dares you to dive deeper into a world of emotion that‰’s appearing right before your very ears, and then that world explodes. The group fulfills the promise of its name; their performance will destroy you, but it will also put you back together.

In this same way, This Will Destroy You is not really made up of performers, but of artists, and that art shows in their precision. As much as their precision may be due to the click used in the group‰’s headphones, the music they created was anything but mechanical. These guys were creating a world for themselves, and once those songs started, they didn‰’t care if you followed them there or not, but boy, do you want to go there with them. A four-piece band never felt so powerful or sentimental. And This Will Destroy You achieve all of this without the utterance of a single word, as This Will Destroy You brand guitar licks serve to transfer deeper senses of expression than most lyricists could possibly hope for.

Hearing this group in a small space is the way to go, and hearing them at all will leave you a changed human being. The group is dynamic in the face of a genre most believe starts and ends with Explosions In the Sky. This Will Destroy You teases new, mysteriously powerful voices from their instruments, and together, those voices will leave you breathless.

By Spencer Swan