It was a chaotic Summer for several of the writers here at MoshPitNation, which has left a lot to catch up on – especially as the year has been a knockout for heavy music so far. Multiple of the best screamo albums in recent memory have come out within the last 12 months, including familiar but virtuosic spins on tried and true sounds and deeply interesting, innovative releases.
Because it is more important for me to highlight what I care about than to feature things in any kind of coherent listicle format, this could be more accurately titled “At Least One of my Favorite Hardcore-adjacent Releases From Each Month From December 2023 to May 2024.” The months from June to present have already provided me with another treasure trove, and some other very exciting releases exist on the horizon, so I will be producing a similar article, probably in December, covering the other side of the year.
Band – Capsule
Album – Ferox (EP)
Country of Origin – USA
Genre – Post-hardcore, Mathcore
Release Date – December 12, 2023
Label – Self-released
The first thing that hits me when listening to anything by Miami’s Capsule is how singular it sounds. Comparisons cannot do justice to a band with such a defined sense of sonic identity. Sludgy, groovy guitar tones exist alongside wildly unpredictable drumming. Vocalist Eric Hernandez’s gruff bark is underpinned by constantly shifting, jazzy chords, among the most complex and beautiful I’ve heard in any heavy release for quite some time.
Ferox features three tracks which all lurch forward like juddering machines, sounding like pasted-together half-second flashes of several different songs. What strikes me the most after many listens is the restraint in the composition. The guitarwork does not prioritize extreme virtuosity or random stylistic swings, instead almost functioning as a glue to paste the constantly fluctuating drum grooves together. Dissonant, unresolved chords are interspersed here with occasional flashes of traditional heavy metal, with a tasteful vibrato placed on a note here and there. Using the familiar, almost nostalgic tropes of hard rock makes this feel less like it’s trying to be heavy as possible, and more that each layer in the texture has an expressive purpose.
All of this makes for a short but sweet collection of complex, twisted hardcore. The cover art, which depicts a blown-out building window with what are either branches or cables tangled everywhere, is a fitting image for this music – each sinew moving the music’s muscle in conflicting directions. It’s awesome to hear Capsule back together after 10 years apart, and it serves as a reminder that no one else has ever sounded like them.
Band – Othiel
Album – We Will Be Our Home
Country of Origin – USA
Genre – Screamo
Release Date – 12/1/2023
Label – Zegema Beach Records
We Will Be Our Home, Othiel’s first full-length release, features a distinctive cover that offers so much to their music’s overall atmosphere. A washed out, beige and olive film photo with an intangible and very strong aura, both melancholy and fearsome. I am reminded of outsider artist Jandek’s album covers, which sometimes depict a similarly sparse and haunting vision of empty suburbia. The cover evokes something unknowable – the mystery, and fear, of a late 90s childhood. Like the cover art, Othiel’s music features beautiful and tragic sentiments intertwining, the nostalgic melancholy of emo directly mixes with extreme metal’s ferocity in a way that feels new again, though comfortably rooted in some of the great bands that have fused these things before.
The music on this record is deliciously precise. Othiel’s basic sonic palette is a bass-heavy, hi-fi blend of low-tuned riffs and monolithic, beautiful chords. This makes for a huge sound, both angst-ridden and indulgently beautiful, exploiting the lush, compressed production styles of modern shoegaze and post metal. Each song is a tightly composed and fast paced miniature, and the transitions from song to song are sometimes unnoticeable.
Where precursor post-metal/screamo acts pushed 10 minutes gradually crescendoing to the point, Othiel’s use of these devices has an immediacy that deepens their impact. Plenty of these songs are slow, many have builds and dynamically shifting sections, but these peaks and valleys of intensity exist within punchy, 3-minute maximum songs.
Band – Our Future Is An Absolute Shadow
Album – LP
Country of Origin – USA/Canada
Genre – Screamo
Release Date – 1/14/2024
Label – Zegema Beach Records
When Heroin or One Eyed God Prophecy recorded in the early and mid-90s, it was a sincere attempt at radical self-expression, a pushing of boundaries, ending up with what was really an avant-garde continuation of the spirit of post-hardcore that had started in the 1980s. In the decades since then, “screamo” has become a codified genre, one I love very much, but within the past five years, countless new, boundary-pushing spins on the style have returned. At a major epicenter of this new and exciting wave is Zegema Beach Records.
Featuring members from the USA and Canada, including Zegema Beach founder Dave Norman, Our Future Is An Absolute Shadow is one of the most exciting recording projects I have heard in the past few years. LP is an anarchic grab bag alternating between time-tested hardcore tropes and new and adventurous style combinations, but that is only part of what makes it great. Despite all of the unfocused mess an album with this description could be, Our Future Is An Absolute Shadow’s evocative style and compositional clarity prevent any murkiness. As a result, I consider LP to be a very cohesive listening experience. At its core is a very specific and elegant approach to songwriting that is unwavering through all the surface-level complexity.
The final track, “Our Present Is An Absolute Nightmare”, shows the group’s ability to pull out a gut-wrenching post-hardcore anthem anytime they want, presenting a climax to the cavalcade of exciting ideas and fearsome violence that preceded it. The pace of this song is much slower, and the tone is somewhat darker than the rest of the album. Within the purview of a band named after a currently worsening set of conditions leading to an apocalypse, the track (and its title) offer a blunt catharsis facing a current day which, by many metrics, is already dystopian.
Band – Edhochuli
Album – Higherlander
Country of Origin – USA
Genre – Post-hardcore/Progressive metal
Release Date – 2/12/2024
Label – Zegema Beach Records
Pittsburgh’s Edhochuli, whose music I was not familiar with before this February release, features a sound unlike any I’ve heard for a long time, featuring plenty of old-school metal shredding and basement-OSDM production atop a punk sensibility that still firmly grounds this in post-hardcore.
This was another grower from this year. I enjoyed it on my first listen, but further attention to the details only furthered my appreciation for its idiosyncratic sound and feel. Certain twin-lead guitar lines would not be out of place in a NWOBHM album. Some chord progressions, voicings and rhythms draw direct lines between fantasy-influenced heavy metal and post hardcore that make it clear how closely related in sound these genres can be. Many moments and textures reminded me of the similarly raw-but-proggy Cormorant, but while that band was firmly rooted in metal, Edhochuli’s style still has the feel of hardcore as an equal partner.
The fourth track, “I’ll Never Forget Ol’ Whats His Name” introduces a riff that is literally a hybrid of the two approaches – featuring a mathy post-hardcore line that morphs partway through into a bluesy classic rock lick, reiterating the chords with a galloping Iron Maiden feel. This and the myriad of other moments like this feel natural and seamless – there’s no cognitive dissonance from flitting about between two approaches and sounds that, on paper, seem miles apart.
Band – Frail Body
Album – Artificial Bouquet
Country of Origin – USA
Genre – Screamo
Release Date – 3/29/2024
Label – Deathwish Records
Artificial Bouquet does not have an intro track, nor a slow buildup, or even a drum countoff. At the beginning of first track “Scaffolding”, before vocalist Lowell Shaffer’s desperate, buried shriek enters the texture, an oppressively heavy slab of black metal wallops the listener. It is a cold plunge, a way to shock the listener into exactly how intense the record will be. Although black metal elements exist throughout the rest of the album, very little is as purely ferocious as the very beginning, a solid 40 seconds of constant, saturated minor key tremolo picking and genuinely powerful blast beats.
While Frail Body’s first full-length offering, the gorgeous A Brief Memoriam, felt like it expressed a personal, earthly pain, this new work shows a more ambitious direction, an expression of feelings that are cosmically huge and genuinely terrifying to confront. That first LP established the basic materials at the band’s disposal in an intense and tragic outburst, featuring great bass playing and a compelling hardcore texture that bends freely between melodic, minor chords and opaque maelstroms of powerviolence. On Artificial Bouquet, Frail Body’s identity as a band remains, but it offers something new, fusing more atmospheric variety into the sound and making the production grittier, thicker, and heavier. While “A Brief Memoriam” had glimmers of down-to-earth, approachable punkness, no such room exists on Artificial Bouquet, an album that cathartically captures the overwhelming size of the band’s grief. Shades of post-metal offer extended passages of quiet, depressive introspection, while the intensity of the band’s extant brand of fast, chaotic hardcore has ratcheted up to an astonishing level.
The second track, “Berth”, introduces another of the album’s prominent modes – a truly violent style of riffing in which the band moves as a single, devastatingly heavy object thrashing back and forth with immense force. It is unreal how heavy, fast, and tight Frail Body’s playing is during these sections. Tempo flows from slow to fast in an elastic fashion, never sacrificing a sense of continuity, as the music remains chaotic and gut-wrenching in its composition. Later tracks like “Monolith”, “Refrain”, “Horizon Line” and especially album closer “A Capsule in the Sediment” set a new benchmark for raw intensity in a crowded year for excellent screamo recordings.
Every instrument in this 3-piece band serves an incredibly important function. Nic Kuczynski’s melodic, technical bass playing occasionally shines through the torrent, but also perfectly supports Lowell Shaffer’s monolithic guitar with its glistening, overdriven tone. As a result, the bass always cuts through the texture, but never intrudes when it is playing a supporting role. The bass’s clarity is especially a boon during the album’s final track, “A Capsule in the Sediment”, during which the bass operates independently of the guitar, sometimes dropping out completely and sometimes playing punctuating statements, in both cases making creative use of its role in the band’s sonic texture. This is a feat both of meticulous engineering and a well-rehearsed band. This full-frequency assault from the bass and guitars is more prominent in the mix than Nicholas Clemenson’s Drums, and certainly more present than Shaffer’s vocals, but never swallows either element completely, instead contributing to a production aesthetic that sounds and feels loud, sometimes even claustrophobic and suffocating.
Band – Heavenly Blue
Album – We Have The Answer
Country of Origin – USA
Genre – Screamo
Release Date – 4/12/2024
Label – Secret Voice
While March ushered in Frail Body’s soaringly beautiful, deeply personal cry of grief, Michiganders Heavenly Blue (a new project rising from the ashes of last decade’s excellent Youth Novel) released a more outward, disturbing take on screamo in April.
WE HAVE THE ANSWER’s production style is grinding, industrial, and brittle. Shades of The Jesus Lizard and Cherubs inflect melodic, riffy hardcore stylings with a harsh and dissonant edge. The guitar tone is blindingly bright, and the bass evokes Steve Albini’s blown-out Traynor amps from old Big Black and Shellac recordings – a noisy fuzz that sounds like broken equipment. This is a perfect complement to their lyrics, which consist of disturbing and abstracted portraits evoking the present and future techno-dystopia and human demise. Some of these lines are large-scale, stomach-churning reminders of the various extinctions the world is facing, and some are more personal, introspective responses to these problems.
The presence of three guitarists allows for rich and varied compositional potential, but the layering never leans into an atmospheric, effects-drenched sound. On the contrary, the songwriting here remains tasteful while also maintaining an impressive variety of stylistic elements and textures. Riffs often have a paradoxically melodic sensibility, both incredibly catchy and always unique. First track “Davos” offers a taste of this, featuring a heavy hardcore intro, complete with some metallic chugs, before a climactic, beautiful chord progression disrupts the chaos. However, the sonic palette the album uses still makes the prettiest moments sound ugly, and keeps a feral spark inside its quieter material. “Looming” is another highlight, a relentless scorcher that burns brightly and quickly, featuring a churning succession of fast, noisy riffs that eventually collapse into a major-key drone that evokes some of the best noise rock of the 90s, an eye-of-the-storm moment that unfurls as soon as it has started.
Although this album is conceptually rich and evocative, it contains no cinematic or epic pretensions. While the new Frail Body record and last year’s fantastic Obroa-Skai recording both had similar expressive and conceptual ambitions, Heavenly Blue keeps this album grounded and sincere. There’s a frankness to it which is both refreshing and disturbing. This is absolutely one of my favorite albums of the year so far.
Band – Glassing
Album – From The Other Side Of The Mirror
Country of Origin – USA
Genre – Post-metal/Post-hardcore
Release Date – 4/26/2024
Label – Pelagic Records
When the texture on “Ritualist” disintegrates into chugs, a fizzing ocean of sludge, it’s some of the heaviest music I have heard all year. One of the most impressive aspects of this release’s sound, though, is that that heaviness also transmits Glassing’s impressive live energy very well. There’s some space for all the sound to breathe here. Whereas modern shoegaze often sounds very “inside” the software used to record it, this album still sounds like the room it was recorded in. This translates a live energy that distinguishes this album in sound from Rorcal’s stylistically similar album last year, a release which cut its own niche by being suffocatingly loud and very heavily processed.
The three members of Glassing (and it’s a constant surprise to remember that it’s only three people making all that noise) each fill a vital role, never shoving each other out of the way in spite of the effects-heavy layering that is a staple of their style. There’s also a great variety in sound that is not obvious from first listen – each track has its own identity, with the doomy, almost industrial “Anything You Want” seamlessly existing alongside the blast-beaten blackgaze of “Defacer” and the melodic, octave-riffing post-hardcore on “Nominal Will”. Bassist Dustin Coffman’s vocals are equally flexible, starting the record with atmospheric cleans before whipping out some genuinely evil black-metal shrieks (which can morph on demand into a more human scream depending on the context).
Band – Clay Birds
Album – Bled Out and Painted Blue
Country of Origin – USA
Genre – Screamo
Release Date – 5/4/2024
Label – Home to Heart Records
Clay Birds is a recently-formed screamo band from California that reignites in me an admiration for everything hardcore can, and should more often, be. It’s equally disturbing and humorous, with a style of recording that is certainly lo-fi but also incredibly clearly mixed. All these attributes give it a tangible sense of personality. There’s very few effects on anything. Songs flit about at will between strange, clean slowcore dirges and extremely dissonant breakdowns. The music is at once precise and sloppy, feeling like something that was put together impulsively in a fit of rage – which is what it should feel like sometimes. The emotional weight that screamo is capable of cuts through in music like this because it has such an effortless, anarchic sense of self.
I’m reminded of the basement-hardcore meets new-wave sound of Cap’n Jazz – not because of specific sonic similarities, but because the ethos is similar. There’s a spark that shines through in listening to the original Cap’n Jazz recordings – “midwest emo” as a style has now been done to death, but those original recordings still have that essence of originality in them. They still sound like someone forgetting the rules and doing their own thing. Clay Birds have that same essence, creating something that feels like more than an on-paper description of emotional hardcore.
Band – Demersal
Album – Demersal
Country of Origin – Denmark
Genre – Screamo
Release Date – 5/10/2024
Label – Tomb Tree Tapes
Demersal bring a tremendous hi-fi heaviness to their music. Instruments constantly shove each other out of the way, comprising a compressed monolith of sound. The guitar tones and vocals are deliciously tonally compatible, both crunchy and noisy in equal measure. The high production value of this music makes for some of the most tactile, textured sounds I’ve heard on a record all year – the screams and guitar feel like sandpaper against the drums and bass’s sturdy, stainless steel surface. Demersal’s aesthetic decisions prioritize “punch”, each instrument perfectly tonally compatible to create a full-frequency wall of sound each time they all play together. This attention to detail and beautiful hi-fi approach to hardcore reminds me of Converge’s sound post-Jane Doe, and indeed plenty of Converge’s DNA can be heard in this. But the most prominent compositional influence is music that is more sad than angry, the crushing defeat of Welcome The Plague Year or the panicked angst of Love Lost But Not Forgotten.
This makes it all the more surprising (yet totally fitting) when the second half of the fourth track, “Something”, suddenly disrupts the band’s avalanche with a moment of unfettered post-rock, a pristine and well-orchestrated interlude that would not sound out of place in the Hollow Knight soundtrack. As if to make up for lost time, subsequent track “Will Never Shows” immediately disrupts this reprieve with one of the most mosh-ready intros to any track I have heard this year. Constant vicissitudes of intensity are deployed expertly by a band that clearly thinks hard about how their music is going to sound – and how it will develop over the course of a release.
