Weston Estate Pushes Their Sound Further on ‘Open Season’
Despite Open Season being their debut album, Weston Estate has spent years developing the sound behind it. The band has been making music together since 2017, giving them nearly nine years to experiment with who they are and what they want to sound like. Exploring indie, alternative, grunge and everything in between, Weston Estate has never seemed particularly interested in fitting neatly into one genre. On Open Season, that experimentation finally comes together — rather than abandoning the different sounds they have explored over the years, the band pulls from each of them, mixing together a collection of every musical project that has led them here.
The album as a whole lives on exciting production, but is held together by more than its sound. Throughout the record, Weston Estate repeatedly returns to the feeling of wanting. Whether it be wanting more, wanting someone back, or wanting something that was never fully theirs to begin with, desire takes different forms from song to song. There’s an underlying restlessness that follows the album from beginning to end. Even as the production shifts between softer, more vulnerable moments and heavier bursts of alternative influence, that sense of longing remains. After nearly nine years of searching for their sound, Open Season finds Weston Estate exploring what happens when the things we search for remain just out of reach.
A slightly wonky guitar opens the lead track “Stain”, before giving way to vocals steeped in frustration and sentimentality. There’s a messiness to it, but it feels entirely intentional. From there, the production seems to absorb every emotional shift, growing and changing alongside the voice at its center. Particularly striking are the guitar strokes, which sound wet and percussive, as though the strings are being slapped or plucked individually rather than simply strummed. By the end, that restraint has mostly disappeared. The instrumentation swells into one of the song’s fullest moments, sending “Stain” out with a bang; it sounds like watching someone lose their temper, make a mess of everything around them, and then finally stand still long enough to realize what they’ve done.
“Scissorman” is easily one of Open Season’s boldest experiments. The track demands attention, both through its dense production and a vocal performance that frequently trades Weston Estate’s usual melodic approach for something closer to talking, shouting, and rapping. There’s an almost unsettling quality to the result, with the production creating a sense of urgency that never really allows the listener to settle in. It feels tailor-made for the background of a frantic television sequence where everything is moving at once and tension is rapidly building. There’s something admirable about Weston Estate being willing to venture this far outside their usual sound, even if “Scissorman” ultimately feels more like an interesting experiment than a direction that plays to the band’s greatest strengths.
For all the yearning scattered across Open Season, “Is this the End?” sounds surprisingly comfortable with letting go. It’s arguably the album’s instrumental high point — it’s electric but never chaotic, and grounded by acoustic textures that occasionally give way to flashes of static. There’s no huge musical breakdown announcing that a relationship has reached its breaking point. Instead, the song sounds like it has been expecting the end all along. That calmness makes the breakup at its center feel less impulsive and more inevitable, as the record transitions into the title track. “Open Season” wastes no time getting moving. Its opening is immediately exciting, carrying a restless energy that makes sitting still feel almost impossible. There’s something nostalgic about it too, reminiscent of the scrappy college bands discovered in cramped venues and passed between friends because the music was simply too exciting to keep quiet. A fuzzy filter coats the vocals and gives them a grungier texture, adding another layer of grit to an already lively track. The result feels loose, energetic, and just wild enough around the edges, capturing the excitement of stumbling across a band before their sound has been polished of all its imperfections.
Weston Estate allows this record to get loud, fuzzy, sentimental, strange, and occasionally chaotic, pulling from nearly a decade of experimentation without forcing those influences into a single genre. The result isn’t always predictable, but predictability would feel out of place on an album this restless. Open Season succeeds because Weston Estate willingly follows an idea wherever it takes them, even when that means stepping beyond the sound listeners might expect. Nine years into their story, their debut suggests there are still plenty of places left to go.
