In an era where indie rock has largely abandoned its bedroom origins for arena-ready choruses and TikTok-friendly hooks, Yoav Vilner’s Run Blind project feels like an excavation—unearthing a sound that peaked sometime around Either/Or and deserves another moment in the sun.
Slow March succeeds at channeling ’90s indie introspection while adding enough modern perspective to feel relevant rather than nostalgic.
Vilner’s biography reads like a contradiction between tech entrepreneurship and songwriting. It’s the kind of duality that feels increasingly relevant. Rather than another cliché about tech companies’ soulless, overworked lifestyle, this feels like someone who’s lived through both worlds and has something to say about the tension between them.
Slow March unfolds like a series of voice memos recorded during 3 AM insomnia sessions, each track capturing a different shade of existential fatigue. The title track opens with finger-picked guitar that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Pavement B-side, while Vilner’s storytelling vocals drift somewhere between Isaac Brock’s mumbled confessions and the quiet desperation of early Modest Mouse.
The album’s emotional anchor, “Light,” emerges from genuine grief—the sudden loss of a childhood friend. The song constructs a narrative about two figures walking together, but only one can see ahead. It’s a heavy-handed metaphor that somehow works, perhaps because the raw material is too honest to dress up in wordplay.
Slow March is thoughtfully crafted indie rock that would have felt at home in 1997 but carries unexpected weight in 2025. While some might dismiss this as aesthetic nostalgia, Vilner’s execution suggests genuine artistic necessity rather than a mere throwback exercise.
The eight tracks maintain a consistent emotional temperature that could feel repetitive but instead builds power. Each song—sparse instrumentation, introspective vocals, metaphors about walking/waiting/watching—adds another layer to a larger meditation on endurance and change.
Slow March succeeds as comfort food for aging millennials who remember when Pitchfork reviews were literature and record stores were churches. But for an artist positioning himself as documenting modern emotional landscapes, the album feels curiously disconnected from the actual anxieties of 2025.
There’s something brave about Vilner’s commitment to analog melancholy in a digital age, and the results feel more like living art than museum curation.
