It's hardly surprising that Snowman's third and final album Absence has that title. With two members heading off to the rocks of Iceland for parenthood, this group (who wowed the Quietus when we put them on with Factory Floor and My Disco last year) have decided to call it a day just as they record their finest work. As well as the title, Absence is a record of tension and pace, as if all too aware that the time is almost up. Along with their Australian fellows HTRK, My Disco, and New War, Snowman are a group who believe in the power of percussion and glacial minimalism to get their point across. Absence certainly owes a debt to the work of Liars and This Heat, but there's more than that at play too - a crystalline psychedelia that makes them kin of Gang Gang Dance, and a spectral mistiness that, with all that drumming, hints at a more abrasive version of what Esben & The Witch earlier this year found in a long-forgotten library. To bid farewell to Snowman, we've been given Absence to stream, and you can do so at the Soundcloud below. As Snowman melt, we salute them.

Snowman - Absence by theQuietus