Bright Shining Lights is a New Jersey project built around cinematic rock. The band writes like they’re scoring a story instead of chasing a playlist slot. The Sun Is A Star is their second full-length, and it plays like one long arc: space, distance, isolation, contact. It’s built at home in a basement but it reaches for widescreen scale, somewhere between post-rock drift, classic prog mood, and modern film score tension.
The record opens in atmosphere. “Go For Launch” feels like pre-mission audio, almost weightless: slow pads, reverb haze, that suspended post-rock stillness before anything actually moves. “Weightless” hits next and pushes harder. It’s instrumental, closer to score work, with low choir, staccato strings, and heavy drums under it. No vocal, just rising pressure. It sounds like orbit burn footage, not a band playing a room.
“Let’s Build A House Beside The Moon” snaps back to something human. The vocal is nostalgic, close, almost private. The percussion is soft and almost hand-played. It’s less outer space, more two people planning an escape. After that, “It’s Full of Stars” pulls the frame wide again. The singing drifts in and out, half-faded, leaving room for guitar and drums to carry motion. It has that slow, steady push you’d hear over a long tracking shot.
That back-and-forth is the point. Some tracks feel like scenes. Others feel like dialogue.
Across the rest of the album, that language keeps repeating in new shapes. “Drift,” “Above the Ground,” “Quiet Escape,” “Restart, Begin,” “Speak (Meet Me Where I Am)” — all of them sit in the same world. The band leans on tone and pacing instead of hooks. Guitars don’t shred; they hang in air. Drums hit when they need to and then fall back out. There are bursts of orchestral weight, then long stretches of calm where you’re just sitting in a mood.
It’s not nostalgia cosplay, but it nods to obvious touchpoints: Pink Floyd in the way everything unrolls with patience, Radiohead in the sense that the vocal sometimes feels like an internal monologue more than a performance, Hans Zimmer in how the drums and low voices hit when the stakes go up. You can hear all of that. But it doesn’t feel stitched together. It feels like one band working inside one idea.
The Sun Is A Star is less “a bunch of songs” and more sequence. Sixteen tracks that play like a film with no picture: launch, drift, contact, return. You could drop any one song into a sci-fi drama, a loss montage, an empty-highway dawn shot and it would sit there like it belongs. That’s not accidental. Bright Shining Lights are already thinking in sync terms. They’re writing for scenes that don’t exist yet, and daring someone to build them.
Discover more from Cinematic Giants
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
