Artist

This Will Destroy You

San Marcos, United States · Formed 2005

This Will Destroy You is a music group from San Marcos, United States, active since 2005. Their discography on Gatefold includes 10 records.

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Albums tracked

In collections

2005

Since

Biography

Young Mountain wasn't even meant to be a record. It was a demo to help the guys get gigs around San Marcos, but the local scene in Texas lost its collective mind and forced their hand. They tracked those six songs with basically no budget, leaning on a lot of delay and reverb to mask the fact that they were just kids figuring out how to fill a room. It’s loud, it’s earnest, and it’s got that specific mid-2000s bloom that every explosive post-rock band tried to mimic for a decade. Then the self-titled record hit in '08 and everything got heavier and more expensive. John Congleton produced it at his studio, Electrical Audio, and you can hear him pushing them to stop being polite. He’s the guy who worked with Swans and Baroness, and he brought that darker, more muscular production to the table. It saved them from being just another Explosions in the Sky clone. They traded the shimmering crescendos for something that actually felt like it could collapse a ceiling.

Bio from The Clerk

The Arc of This Will Destroy You

The pivots — what forced This Will Destroy You to reinvent.

The Congleton Shift
Bringing in John Congleton for the 2008 self-titled album changed the trajectory from melodic Texas post-rock into something far more abrasive. Congleton dragged them into a room where the drums felt like physical assaults and the guitars started to fray at the edges. This wasn't about 'pretty' anymore; it was about the physical weight of the sound. You can hear the transition from the polite optimism of the demo days to a band that finally understood how to use distortion as a weapon.
The Dark Ambient Pivot
By the time they got to Tunnel Blanket in 2011, the band had suffered through some real-world heavy shit, and it shows in every frame of that record. They leaned into drone and doom-inflected textures, largely abandoning the traditional 'quiet-loud-quiet' structure that defined their early work. This is the moment they stopped trying to be a rock band and started trying to be a force of nature. It’s a bleak, difficult record that cost them some of the casual fans but earned them the respect of the noise and ambient scenes.
The Lineup Fractures
The 2018 New Others sessions were the last gasp of a specific era before the founding lineup really started to splinter. Jeremy Galindo and Chris King were still the dual-guitar engine, but the internal friction was becoming a feature of the writing process. They released two full-lengths in the span of a month, sounding like a band trying to exorcise every remaining idea before the inevitable split. It’s dense, complicated work that lacks the cohesion of their earlier stuff but contains some of their most technical playing.

Influences

Mogwai — The band has cited Mogwai’s Young Team as a foundational text for their dynamic range. You hear it in the way they use silence as a precursor to a wall of sound. It’s the blueprint for the 'loud' part of the post-rock equation.
My Bloody Valentine — Jeremy Galindo has explicitly credited Kevin Shields for the way TWDY approaches guitar textures and 'glide guitar' techniques. The sheer density of the reverb on Young Mountain is a direct descendant of the Loveless sessions. They took the shoegaze wash and applied it to instrumental structures.
The Dirty Three — Warren Ellis and company showed them how to make instrumental music feel narrative without needing a singer. TWDY captures that same sense of tragic, improvised momentum that defines the early Dirty Three records. It’s about the emotional arc rather than the technical riff.
Arvo Pärt — During the Tunnel Blanket era, the band was listening to a lot of holy minimalism, particularly Pärt. You hear those slow-moving, repetitive structures replacing the standard rock crescendos. It moved them away from 'songs' and toward 'movements'.
Stars of the Lid — Both bands are products of the same expansive Texas geography, and TWDY has referenced the Lid’s drone-heavy approach many times. The use of long-form, glacial textures on Field Studies is a direct nod to the ambient groundwork laid by their fellow Texans. It’s that Big Bend atmosphere put on tape.