The project of producer/visual artist Matthew Barnes, Forest Swords' intense beats and pensive moods blur the lines between moods and eras as well as genres. The project's early work, such as 2010's Dagger Paths EP, revealed that Barnes was as indebted to post-punk as he was to dub and hip-hop, but Forest Swords' horizons continued to expand on 2014's debut album Engravings and 2017's Compassion, which incorporated jazz, global, and classical music into a more restrained approach. Barnes' somber fusion of the ancient and futuristic suited scoring work perfectly, and he became a sought-after composer, working on projects ranging from Assassin's Creed: Rogue to the award-winning documentary Ghosts of Sugar Land. As renowned as Barnes became for his approach, the surprisingly dense and gritty -- but still hauntingly beautiful -- sound of 2023's Bolted burnished Forest Swords' reputation as a distinctive, yet continually surprising, creative force.