Floating – Hesitating Lights Is Anything But Something You Should Hesitate to Hear

If you’re a fan of John Hughes movies and death metal, this might just be your album of the year. Let me clarify before diving in: there are no angst-ridden teen lyrics, no songs about Saturday detention, no tales of skipping class, and you definitely won’t find a track about standing in the shower with a woman you just brought to life in your bedroom. But if you remember the soundtracks to those films? You’re in for something special.

It took a few full listens for me to really come to terms with how I feel about this album. There’s no gimmick here. This isn’t some ‘80s film soundtrack homage set to death metal. This isn’t a band pushing a half-baked concept that’ll be gone by their next release. Okay, I can’t guarantee that last part — but I can say I hope that’s not the case.

I’m genuinely blown away by what Arvid Sjödin and Andreas Hörmark — the duo behind Floating — have crafted here. Hesitating Lights is the follow-up to their 2022 full-length The Waves Have Teeth, and while only three years apart, this new record sounds like the result of decades of refinement, growth, and experimentation. The album will be released on July 11 through Transcending Obscurity.

The opener, Reached the Mew, is one of the standout tracks for me. It sets the tone perfectly and gives you an unapologetic introduction to how the next 30 minutes of your life are going to unfold. It blends clean and distorted guitars with a mix of drum styles in a way that makes me unsure if I should be headbanging or walking off into the sunset with a fist in the air. Though, if it’s the latter, that would mean the album’s already over — and you do not want to miss the other seven tracks.

The title track, Hesitating Lights, also the longest song on the album at six minutes and thirteen seconds, is another standout for me. It opens with a synth and riff that makes you feel like the lead in a movie, stepping up to the mic to give the speech that changes everything. It was after getting to this track on my first play-through that I immediately restarted the album. Something about it reframed the entire experience — it made me realize that each song on this record is written as a specific moment, a feeling, an experience. Not in a way where everyone’s going to take the same thing from it, but in a choose your own adventure kind of way.

For me, those experiences came as flashes of the ‘80s movies I grew up with — hence the theme of this review. But I could just as easily see someone being transported back to their first vinyl purchase or the first punk show they hit with their friends. This album brings memories to the surface, ones that have nothing to do with Floating at all. And somehow that only deepens the experience.

Every track here is layered so thoughtfully that even after a dozen plays, I’m still finding new textures and catching fresh emotional hits. I never thought I’d be this hyped on an album that mixes clean and distorted guitars, plays with so many genres, and somehow nails the balance. There are elements of New Wave, Post-Punk, Black Metal, Death Metal, and more — but never in a way that overwhelms or feels overindulgent. As I said earlier, this doesn’t feel like a gimmick at all.

By the way, if you’re not catching all the references in this review to the greatest decade in cinema, you’re missing out, both on the cues I’m pulling from this record and on the movies that shaped my generation. Hit me up on socials and I’ll throw you some recommendations.

All that aside, what Floating has created here is an album that should be studied, celebrated, and, if history repeats itself, poorly imitated for years to come. I don’t see any other band being able to capture this exact feeling again. This is an album that should be in the running not just for album of the year, but album of the decade.