Local Review: The Wildfires – Long Division

The Wildfires
Long Division
BPC
Street: 10.03.2025
The Wildfires = The Antlers + Portishead

The Wildfires are local to SLC and have been putting out album after album of indie/alt rock music. Their album Long Division thrives somewhere between restraint and release. Rather than chasing immediate hooks, The Wildfires let tension accumulate in slow, deliberate waves, rewarding patience with towering crescendos. Under the surface, the album’s central concern is a return to nature, as if each track is trying to find its way back to something elemental and alive.

The opener “Storm Coming” unfolds almost imperceptibly, beginning with quiet resolve before expanding into a swell of layered acoustic guitar strumming and yearning vocals. When the refrain — “Flood waters lap at the gate, We scream at the tempest that surrounds us” — arrives, it feels less like a lyric than a transmission sent into the world, establishing the album’s recurring fascination with distance, connection, and the pull of the natural world.

“Hiding” is the record’s emotional epicenter. Gentle acoustic strumming gradually gives way to a cavernous low organ that envelops the listener. The effect is disorienting and weepy, its haunting chorus — “You will never find me, I will never find you” — lingering long after the song fades.

Elsewhere, “Fight” detonates in a barrage of wailing guitars that blur the line between anthem and incantation. “Gone” offers a welcome shift in perspective, wrapping fuzzy vocals in shimmering, distorted textures that evoke the bittersweet haze of late summer, while “The Space Between” lands one of the album’s most satisfying payoffs as its chorus blooms from quiet introspection into catharsis.

The production is consistently impressive throughout Long Division, bathing nearly every track in generous reverb without sacrificing detail. That sense of space becomes Long Division’s defining feature: an album that feels simultaneously expansive and isolating, finding natural beauty in echoes, unresolved tension and the quiet hope of reconnecting something lost. —Kamryn Feigel

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