Seven Hour Days — The Game
Released July 30, 2025
From Perth, Western Australia
Indie and shoegaze
Emerging from the sun-faded outskirts of Perth, Seven Hour Days delivers a stunning five-track collection with The Game — a record that doesn’t just channel classic shoegaze influences, it disappears completely into them. The project, led by Australian-born Steve Matzkov, is a solitary meditation on memory, distortion, and the slow drift of time.
Matzkov’s approach is both reverent and refreshingly personal. The Game brings us back to the spirit of shoegaze’s origins — fuzz-drenched guitars swirl and collapse over whisper-soft vocals buried like secrets in a wall of sound. But what sets this project apart is its raw stillness. There’s no urgency here, no need to impress. The EP floats — or maybe decays — at its own pace, like a dream you can’t hold onto but don’t want to forget.
Guitars ring with melancholy, looping into layered textures that feel simultaneously vast and intimate. There’s a warmth to the distortion — a kind of kindness in the chaos — that invites repeated listens. It’s not just nostalgia for the days of Loveless or Nowhere, but a careful reshaping of those emotions through a Western Australian lens: distant, sun-warped, gently eroded.
With The Game, Seven Hour Days doesn’t reinvent the genre. It remembers it — lovingly, quietly, and with depth. This is music made in solitude, but built for anyone who’s ever gotten lost in sound.
© Thusblog