Jeremy Bolm is an oversharer. All through Touché Amoré’s profession, his lyrics have externalized panic assaults and thought spirals, social nervousness and grief, and near-inarticulable existential dread. “I’m exhausting on myself as a result of I’ve been in a band this lengthy and I’m nonetheless writing these sorts of songs,” Bolm lately informed hardcore legend Norman Brannon’s Anti-Matter. “Is there going to be a listener that’s going to be like, ‘Bro, how have you ever not fastened this but?!’”
Concern of stagnation is a legitimate concern. For almost 20 years, Touché Amoré have mined a wealthy vein of melodic hardcore, marrying Bolm’s verbal scarification to staccato bursts of violence and sudden swerves towards magnificence. Highly effective because the system is, Touché have by no means been scared to evolve. The band’s watershed 2016 launch, Stage 4, represented a purging of Bolm’s feelings following the dying of his mom and owed a lot of its impression to its virtually unbearably intimate nature; 2020’s Lament accomplished the band’s maturation from ’90s screamo pastiche to widescreen post-hardcore. On Spiral in a Straight Line, their wonderful sixth report, Touché start one other metamorphosis.
A lot of Lament contended with the fallout of Stage 4’s launch and its impact on Bolm. Although the brand new album makes reference to earlier themes (“Ten years gone,” he notes on “The Glue”), its songs are discrete vignettes, at instances feeling virtually like a brief story assortment. Album opener “No person’s” broadcasts the break from earlier conceptual conceits: “So let’s grieve in a ahead path,” barks Bolm, his pleas bouncing off a fascinating alt-rock groove.
Spiral in a Straight Line is an overture of reconciliation to the 2 wolves inside Touché Amoré: hardcore and indie rock. They take puckish glee within the determination to characteristic Lou Barlow on “Subversion (Model New Love)”: Barlow’s trajectory from Deep Wound to Dinosaur Jr to Sebadoh (whose “Model New Love” he self-interpolates right here) is as instructive to Touché’s ethos as any ABC No Rio or Che Cafe common. The music itself is a clinic—a depressing, smoldering churn that immediately turns into one of many album’s largest barn-burners, replete with serrated guitars and Barlow’s pained howls.
The band has misplaced not one of the adventurousness of Lament, however the songs are extra direct and rapid, weaponizing Bolm’s hoarse roar in service of the strongest and most stunning hooks of their profession up to now. The bridge of “Hal Ashby” melds their anthemic chew with the studied whimsy of an Elephant 6 band, all wistful sighs and chiming guitars till it cuts right into a deafening scream. The shuddering, swaying refrain of “Altitude” is a high-water mark; when Bolm’s self-lacerating declaration of “I swear there’s nothing new” collides with a mordant waltz, it’s a grimly humorous reminder that he’s mistaken.
