Abacot – Songs About Problems | Album Review

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Abacot and Many Hats Distribution

It’s been almost three years, but I still remember where I was when I first heard Abacot’s EP Promo 2023. I had just hiked over a bridge for a mile in direct sunlight, and it was only getting hotter as I tried to get through my dreaded commute. I made the mistake of wearing a cloying polyester dress, and mosquitoes were tearing me up as I descended the endless Woodley Park-Zoo/Adams Morgan escalator. Ultimately, it was just a regular Tuesday in July. I waited for the train, squeezed in, and, naturally, the A.C. was out. I checked my phone while crammed between two businessmen and saw that Swim Into The Sound had reviewed a new EP from a band in the DMV, so I listened to the whole thing through the rest of my commute. I was late for work.

It’s been a couple of years and change since I was sweating it out on that train, and Abacot has returned with a follow-up to that EP today — Songs About Problems is here in all of its bright and bitter glory. For those out of the loop, Abacot is a project helmed by Claudio Benedi, the former frontman of D.C.’s beloved Commander Salamander. Abacot always feels like a true puzzle piece to understanding the larger regional rock sound: this album was produced and engineered by Ryland Heagy, and better yet, when they perform live, their shows are stacked with familiar faces from the world of DMV music (think Combat, think Origami Angel).

Songs About Problems picks up where Promo 2023 left off. While it still features the three songs from that initial EP (with some rerecording), the concentrated misery underpinning all of Promo 2023 is expanded into a rounder emotional release. Benedi totally recontextualizes the initial project – one born out of grief, betrayal, and banality – and transforms it into an examination of difficult personal growth after these dark moments have passed. Beyond the inimitable ear of Ryland Heagy, this album was mixed by Drew Portalatin, the mastermind behind Origami Angel’s mixtape The Brightest Days and Combat’s instant thrasher classic, Stay Golden. It was also mastered by Will Yip, fresh off his Grammy win for Turnstile’s NEVER ENOUGH —a combination that instantly pushes Songs About Problems into an echelon of undeniable ragers.

Sonically, Songs About Problems starts somewhere in 2001 or maybe 2003; I’m still debating the exact year, but it was definitely when you could buy checkered wristbands at Hot Topic, guys in emo bands wore collared shirts, and it was mandatory to spike your hair like Deryck Whibley. The lyrics of “Remember When” match this nostalgic sound as Benedi reflects on the distance between him and a former friend. What starts as something The Starting Line-adjacent switches up mid-song, and Benedi shows off his guitar prowess, a sound distinctly reminiscent of that early ‘20s emo sound he helped popularize, across the bridge.

The frustration of “Remember Me” softens into “One Way Street,” a daringly optimistic song. Benedi is a very talented musician, and one of his undeniable strengths is his ability to create absolute earworms. After just one listen to the chorus, I caught myself singing along to that helplessly catchy, “And I’m yours / are you mine?” on the second spin. The song chugs along, evoking a kind of Fountains of Wayne-style build before opening into “Check Engine Light” and “Vertigo” from Promo EP. 

These songs have lived on my shelf and in my playlists for three years, and they are still just as electric as they were when I first listened to them on that Metro ride. I’ve thought about “Check Engine Light” every time I can’t get my car engine to turn over when it gets a bit too cold out. “Vertigo,” devastating yet unafraid to get a little King of the Hill-theme song with it, has been perpetually stuck in my head since the first time I heard Benedi sing “I see all your lies / I see through your disguise!” 

After revisiting these tracks from the Promo EP, we have some songs that totally reorient the Abacot project from something wrought with nausea and exhaustion into a broader, more pop-bent with begrudging positivity. “Vertigo” launches into the anthemic, arena-rock “Show You,” molding Benedi’s shapeshifting agony into a single question: “I freed my heart / what about you?” On “Iridescent,” he flexes his Bowling For Soup-y humor over a song that could easily soundtrack a Tony Hawk Pro Skater game, and the synths on “Drifter” take the whole album to Saturn and back.

In Swim Into The Sound’s initial review, Taylor Grimes aptly diagnosed how “When people think of ‘emo music,’ they tend to think of sappy, tappy, whiny bullshit. That’s all well and good, but it’s SUMMER, and the people need something light, something they can sing along to with the windows down.” That’s what “Horror,” the third song from Promo EP, does. While the other two carryover songs are visceral in their anguish, “Horror” is hauntingly hopeful. Benedi soars into the song as he sings, “If we’re going to make it / I know we’re gonna make it to the end.”

“Horror,” in this new context, provides the perfect aerial arc for the album’s ending on the titular “Songs About Problems.” I wouldn’t call it a positive or even a helpful song, any more than I’d call this album particularly optimistic, but it’s honest and self-assured. Benedi doesn’t necessarily regret these difficult years, but that doesn’t mean that the outcomes don’t still hurt. Instead, he diffuses what frustrates him the most and recognizes it in others. We will get through this together.

I don’t live in D.C. anymore and no longer have to do that long commute, but for one day, I wish I could do it one more time, listening to Songs About Problems.

Caro Alt (she/her) is from New Orleans, Louisiana, and if she could be anyone in The Simpsons, she would be Milhouse.

Heart Sweats II: Another Swim Into The Sound Valentine’s Day Mixtape

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Rip open that box of chocolates, pour out some red wine, and grab a handful of chalky heart-shaped candies, ‘cause we’ve got a lovey-dovey Valentine’s Day roundup for all you hopeless romantics out there. In celebration of the world’s most amorous holiday, we asked the Swim Team what love songs are hitting them particularly hard right now. Much like last year’s edition, the result is a beautiful and wide-ranging mixtape from the Swim Team directly to you. 

Alien Boy – “Seventeen”

Get Better Records

Falling in love is stupid. It’s one of the most senseless things you can throw yourself into, but that’s how it has to be. Love is going to embarrass you, humble you, and terrify you; it's going to make you act crazy and hurt in ways you never thought possible… It’s also the best thing in the world. Before there can be love, there must be that weird liminal period where you’re not sure what’s going on within yourself or with this person. You’re not sure if this feeling is one-sided or just something you’re thinking too much about and building up in your head. Most people call this the “crush” stage, and it can be just as exhilarating as it is disastrous.

That feeling of a new relationship, of fresh, dumb, pure emotional adoration is captured perfectly in “Seventeen” by Alien Boy. It’s a song embodying the feeling of adolescent love, the type of love that takes over your body and abducts your mind. The bouncy guitar jangle acts as the heartbeat while the bass and drums add a propulsive, restless energy like a leg you can’t stop bouncing. Every waking moment, you’re consumed with this sense of possibility; all the imagined realities and possible futures. You need reckless abandon. You need to let it out, or you’re gonna implode. You’ve gotta love like you’ve never loved someone before. It’s all or nothing.

– Taylor Grimes


Brahm – “I will find you”

Self-Released

Screamo is not typically the place you look to for romantic love songs. Despondent longing, sure, plenty of examples there, but espousals of deep care and adulation not rooted in agony can be a bit hard to come by. Which is really a shame. A genre as complex and passionate as this owes itself to have at least a few tracks that explore love in its connective tenderness. This is why when Brahm released “I will find you,” I was very quickly moved to tears. Here, so much of what makes this music powerful was being channeled into a grand exultation of the relationship between the singer and his now-fiancée, concentrated into an incantational promise: “I will find you / In every lifetime / Just like we / Were always meant to.” Screamed, repeated, driven up into a crescendo: “I will find you” is one of the few screamo songs that feels truly pure in its love while claiming and owning all the sonic intensity one can expect from a legendary band like Brahm. Tender, subtle, gentle, then explosive. Though few in number, screamo love songs are immense and absolutely worth weeping over on our most saccharine of holidays.

– Elias Amini


The Meters – “Mardi Gras Mambo”

Warner Records

Every few years, like this year, Valentine’s Day coincides with the final round of Mardi Gras festivities. It always kind of irritated me when that happened. Mardi Gras is such an insular holiday with days upon days of nonstop partying and local antics, while Valentine’s Day’s appearance always felt like it was abruptly intruding—a pink and red reality check while I’m dealing with purple, green, and gold. I have softened on this position over time and have personally compromised by including Mardi Gras songs amongst my pantheon of the greatest love songs. When measuring how much love I feel towards my favorite Mardi Gras songs, I think I love The Meters’ cover of “Mardi Gras Mambo” the most. Quite frankly, the little funky keys part at the beginning is one of the most beautiful things put to wax and best enjoyed with a daiquiri in hand. It's an old song, somewhere around 70 years old, meaning that it’s been played for generations of New Orleanians like me. This means that everyone knows it, everyone sings it, and everyone does the same little dance to it while standing on the streets. Love is in everything, and love is everywhere, but love is especially in the Mardi Gras mambooooo down in New Orleans.

– Caro Alt


ManDancing – “I Really Like You (Carly Rae Jepsen cover)”

Something Merry

Sometimes people joke about Carly Rae Jepsen being the queen of emo, except I’m not joking. In 2015, she blessed the world with an instant-classic pop album, Emotion, absolutely overflowing with timeless desire, courageous sincerity, and selfless love. Three short years later, Something Merry and 15 talented artists orchestrated a cover album, with all proceeds donated to Immigration Equality.
EMO-TION redirects the original album’s skyscraper-high pop sensibilities into intimate articulations for any occasion. In their cover of “I Really Like You,” ManDancing takes the already perfectly unsure, desperate, brave lyrics and fills them with bated breath, yearning, and a passion literally begging to be met. The guest vocals from Em Noll in the chorus mirror lead singer Steve Kelly’s feelings, not knowing if falling so fast is a good idea, and not really caring. 

I met my partner at a rock concert, and after our second date, 72 hours later, I said to her, “I think we’re in trouble.” What began as innocently getting to know each other quickly spiraled into a long-distance relationship spanning the Atlantic Ocean. These days, our distance only spans Iowa, and even then, we’re lucky enough to see each other almost every month. This song reminds me of when we met, let go of everything, and fell for each other. 

ManDancing, king of this single; Carly Rae Jepsen, queen of emo music; Annie Watson, queen of my heart.

– Braden Allmond


Oso Oso – “skippy”

Self-released

This just in: love is just liking everything about a person?

I like how you’re a little messy when you’re in your comfortable spaces–like how you leave your socks by my bed, yet you’re so put-together everywhere else. I like how you know that I can be a bit of a fuck-up sometimes, but you see who I am on the inside and, even more so, who I’m trying to be on the outside. I like the songs you show me, even when I don’t like the genre. But I like them because you showed them to me. I like how every melody of every song I hear is a sunny-bright hook, like literally every line of music and lyrics in “skippy” by Oso Oso. With you in the world, every song is catchier, every bite tastes better.

Most of all, I like the way that it could only be you and that you knew it before I did. I might be late to our party, but I’m grateful and lucky to go with you on my arm.

– Joe Wasserman


Touché Amoré – “Come Heroine”

Epitaph Records

I’ve never been one for love songs. I often find them saccharine, bogged down by cliche emotion and sticky with reductive lyrics that I’m sure I’ve heard elsewhere. I’ve been in love with my husband for nearly a decade, and it’s nearly impossible to find a song that accurately captures the enduring and torrential force of that kind of love, yet Touché Amoré manages to do just that in “Come Heroine.” The song crashes forward like an avalanche, rushing headlong into a crashing ocean of honest declaration: “You brought me in / You took to me / And reversed the atrophy / Did so unknowingly / Now I’m undone.” I’ve repeated this raw confession countless times, the rhythm of my heart counting the syllables. Love has disarmed me, shown me my weaknesses, and simultaneously strengthened me. “When I swore I’d seen everything / I saw you.” And even after a decade, seeing my husband every morning feels like the first time I realized I was in love with him. Even when the day comes that I finally have seen everything, I know it will still pale in comparison to him. Maybe I am one for love songs after all. 

– Britta Joseph


The Smashing Pumpkins – “Stand Inside Your Love”

Virgin Records

What does it actually mean to actually stand inside someone’s love? The hell if I know, but what I do know is that in the Y2K era Billy Corgan still had his fastball when it came to writing pop songs. “Stand Inside Your Love” is a shining example of this. It’s catchy as all get out, the lyrics are simple and easy to remember, I mean, I don’t know what else to tell you, it’s just a groovy listening experience. Those classic Pumpkins' new wave guitar textures still hit like an anvil to the heart to this day. It’s one of those love songs that still has some oomph when listening. Do yourself a favor and play this for your partner for Valentine’s or cruising around town on date night. You can thank me later. If they love the song, tell them that David sent you. If not, lose my number.

For extra credit, if you’re into the vaudeville subgenre, this song’s music video will scratch every itch you could ever imagine. 

– David Williams


Kings of Leon – “Find Me”

RCA

My partner and I have been together for almost a decade, which means there are a lot of songs to choose from that have been cornerstones to our relationship. I’d been finding it difficult to choose the best one to write about this year, and I suppose it took the pressing deadline of this article’s publish date to bless me with the source. Kings of Leon have unabashedly been one of my favorite bands since I was in grade school, despite their more recent material falling a bit flat for me. But it’s actually a song from their 2016 album WALLS that comes up quite a lot in our musical lexicon with one another, a song that finds the Followill family doing their best Interpol impression, of all bands. “Find Me” is without a doubt the best piece of music the band has released in the last ten years, an upbeat rocker that doesn’t mute Caleb’s signature voice like their other latest singles do. The chorus, which is largely anchored by the question “How did you find me?”, is an effervescent feeling we share and echoes the gratitude we carry that we found each other at all. In the second verse, Caleb pleads, “Take me away, follow me into the wild with a twisted smile, I can’t escape. And now I got you by my side, all my life, day after day.”

The WALLS Tour was one of the first concerts we ever went to together, and the jolt we got when they played “Find Me” kept us going throughout the rest of the 2+ hour set. I am gushingly lucky to have found my one, even if the “how” of it all doesn’t have a definitive answer. Although, it may be hard sometimes to find each other at Costco.

– Logan Archer Mounts


Angel Olsen – “Spring”

Jagjaguwar

“Don’t take it for granted, love when you have it,” is a line that has felt like a mantra ever since my first listen to this track on Angel Olsen’s 2019 album, All Mirrors. Sometimes the songs most indicative of love are the ones that describe the spaces in between it, the moments longing for it, and the times when it’s found, even if its presence only exists in a brief moment. “Spring” is downtempo enough to soundtrack a slow dance, but as the keys and orchestral production swell, it’s easy to get lost inside of due to its musical syntax and structure. It’s the auditory equivalent to the head rush of a kiss; it overtakes you but brings you back down from it gently. Even as Olsen reflects on others who may have found “it,” her optimism reaches the song’s ultimate peak of vulnerability as she plainly asks for it: “So give me some heaven just for a while, make me eternal here in your smile.”

– Helen Howard


MUNA – “Kind Of Girl”

Saddest Factory Records

Valentine’s Day can be hard when you’re single. I spent most of my twenties in a committed relationship, and now I can’t remember the last Valentine’s Day I celebrated that lined up with me being in a romantic relationship. However, even if you’re not romantically entangled on February 14th this year or any year, what’s most important is your perspective. I’ve been in and out of relationships quite a bit since my last major relationship broke off, and when any of those relationships have fizzled out, I found myself clinging to negative self-talk as I often do. “Kind Of Girl,” off of MUNA’s self-titled record, is a song I cling to when I need a reminder that it’s more important than anything to treat myself with grace and accept my flaws as human. Despite their catalog being full of sad queer girl music, this track takes a softer approach to sitting with your emotions. I’m the kind of girl who feels her emotions so intensely, both when falling in and out of love, or even in the presence of the slightest crush. A connection can simply run its course, yet I have to tell myself all the ways I should’ve done things differently and that I’m better off avoiding further entanglements. I’m glad I have MUNA to remind me in those moments that I need to love myself harder. I need to be gentle with the kind of girl I am, maybe lean into one of my many hobbies, and keep my heart open to the next person who wants to connect with me – and this time, let them. 

– Ciara Rhiannon

Ratboys – Singin' to an Empty Chair | Album Review

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New West Records

Snowed in. Roads iced over. Trying on New Year’s resolutions and dropping New Year’s resolutions. What else is there to do at this time of year but think about last year? Openly celebrate what went right and privately obsess over what went wrong. Why did that one thing happen? How can you make sure it never happens again? Why did they say that to you? What should you have said back? Why didn’t they talk to you after that? Why didn’t they listen to you? Why didn’t you try harder to make them stay?

Julia Steiner, frontwoman of Ratboys, got the title for the band’s latest album, Singin' to an Empty Chair, from a therapy tool called The Empty Chair Technique. The premise of the exercise is simple on paper: you imagine that someone you want to have a difficult conversation with is sitting right across from you, and you have that complicated conversation. Alone. But this is obviously easier said than done. Actually mustering up the courage to verbalize the words you have kept buried for so long, to even say them by yourself, is intimidating. Gathering the courage to admit wrong, to share a secret, to ask for better, to try again, is an impossible feeling. Ratboys know this well.

Singin' to an Empty Chair is the sixth album from the Chicago indie stars and their first release on New West Records. This album also marks their second collaboration with Chris Walla of Death Cab for Cutie, who also produced 2023’s The Window. Steiner described their last album as a “dedicated and intentional process,” the product of a meticulous couple years of writing and rehearsing before recording anything officially. Singin' to an Empty Chair offers a different perspective. Bassist Sean Neumann describes this record as a quilt – a collection of songs written in different places and recorded in different spaces. This patchwork approach is pieced together by songs describing half-conversations and one-sided admittances, all sewn together with their signature mind-bending guitar and twangy lilt. 

Photo by MILES KALCHIK

Where were you while we were getting high? Wanna go for a ride? On “Open Up,” Steiner adds to the canon of great rock music questions when she asks, “What’s it gonna take to open up tonight?” She asks this over the confident strum of a guitar, but as the song builds, Steiner’s bright voice is interjected by sparks of the rest of the band, a moment of fuzz here, a kick drum there, before building into a folksy jam. The whole band is firing on all cylinders, and the only place to go from here is the stars.

Ratboys’ greatest sleight of hand is their cosmic bend, and they are very precise with how they blend it into their twang. On their last album, Ratboys took listeners to the brink of the world on “Black Earth, WI.” On Singin' to an Empty Chair, Ratboys avoid their own beaten path but find a new supersonic twist on “Light Night Mountains All That.” The song starts by sweeping you off your feet, sending you into a vortex of Dave Sagan’s swirling guitar and the uncanny rhythm of Marcus Nuccio’s drumming. At first, Steiner’s voice steadies the spinning, repeating an increasingly frustrated accusation that “you didn’t care.” Her voice, while always clear and measured, builds and builds until it’s blistering because “you didn’t care / you didn’t care / you didn’t / care!” This irritation seems to blow a hole in the vortex, turning Sagan’s guitar into something more intergalactic. 

The music video released alongside this single matches its extraterrestrial spin. Styled like a found-footage horror film, some kind of haunting evil forces invade while the band plays their song. The ghouls flicker in and out of the video, almost like they’re interfering with the signal, until they’re playing the song too. This cataclysmic feeling Ratboys spin is one of their most exciting tricks—a soundtrack for the final frontier. 

Just because we’re singing to an empty chair here and embracing conversations we hesitate to have does not mean that every imagined conversation has to be upsetting or frustrating. It’s hard to admit how much you love someone, too. In “Penny in the Lake,” serene optimism is conveyed through berry pies, Ringo Starr, and the breathless crow of a rooster. “Strange Love” is an earnest confession that conjures slightly sweaty palms, and “Anywhere” evokes a vulnerable, but freeing feeling, like admittance with avoidant eye contact. 

The title of the album appears in “Just Want You to Know the Truth,” the album’s 8-minute bittersweet barnstormer. Across a mournful pedal steel, Steiner weaves snapshots of a past she can’t return to: construction sites, lasagna on Christmas Eve, and Antiques Roadshow. The emotional core of the album is buried somewhere in the sawdust of this song, between Steiner’s aching lyrics and Sagan’s biting guitar. The resonance of the Empty Chair Technique is laid bare as Steiner grimly sings “A couple some odd years ago / You said, ‘Sweetie take your time’ / So now I’m singin’ to an empty chair / Bleedin’ out every line.” It’s a punishing admonishment about forgiveness and time, combined with a cathartic release of finally saying something, even if it's alone.

The album closes with two opposed songs. The penultimate track, “Burn it Down,” while starting syrupy, turns incendiary as the band unleashes a fury they have tamped down for five albums. Steiner gives in to the doom built up by the song’s ferocious sound, just for a moment, saying, “It’s always been this way / It’s never gonna change.” But this anger washes away. The album ends on “At Peace in the Hundred Acre Woods” offering a bookend to the breezy sound that it began with. It’s a swaying, reassuring song, something that is supposed to play softly from a speaker on your patio while you’re talking to an empty lawn chair. 

On “Just Want You to Know the Truth,” Steiner sings, “Well, it’s not what you did / it’s what you didn’t do / I just want you to know the truth.” It was here, as I was caught in my thoughts about 2025 and my weirdest, lowest points, that I understood the Empty Chair Technique. It’s not just about addressing the truth, but verbalizing what you need to get to the truth. Since then, I’ve been thinking about who I want to talk to in the empty chair next to me. The blue one next to the couch I’m writing this on. What truth do I need to be made real? What about you? Who is in your empty chair? What do you want to tell them?

Caro Alt (she/her) is from New Orleans, Louisiana, and if she could be anyone in The Simpsons, she would be Milhouse.

Blackwater Holylight – Not Here Not Gone Review

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Suicide Squeeze Records

When it comes to stoner rock, sometimes it feels like there’s little room for the form to expand. So often, bands fall into tar pits as they rehash the same trite lyrics and recycle the same five sludgy riffs. For titans like Sleep, this genre can be taken to bong-ripping heights, but other acts like The Sword iterate until they become parodies of their earlier, more exciting selves. If they are averse to marijuana mysticism, a band might instead go down the path of the thousand-dollar leather jacket and embrace more of a desert rock direction. Queens of the Stone Age make this look cool, but most of the time you’ll end up sounding like Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. So how do you inject new life into a style that often reads as riff-by-numbers? You abandon it almost entirely.

That’s exactly what Blackwater Holylight have done. On their first two albums, the Portland, Oregon, group’s sound was dripping in bluesy, chugging 70’s hard rock. They were proficient in their Sabbath worship, but not altogether original. In fact, 2019’s Veils of Winter is so entrenched in the desert-doom sound that it literally has a song titled “Motorcycle.” These are good albums, but it’s clear that the risk was there for them to become trapped in the endless cycle of cannabinoid riffage. The band’s third album, Silence/Motion, was a massive reimagining of their music as the group became darker and more dreamlike, adding in elements of prog and shoegaze. The result is something simultaneously refined and menacing, but what makes it so impressive is that it’s very clearly the same band that made the first two records.

On Blackwater Holylight’s new album, Not Here Not Gone, the group is continuing to evolve their artistry while remaining true to their roots. After relocating to LA and working with producer Sonny Diperri (Narrow Head, DIIV, Emma Ruth Rundle), the trio has cultivated a vicious doomgaze sound that is equal parts punishing and ethereal. The album opens with “How Will You Feel,” which immediately signals that Blackwater Holylight is continuing to push the limits of their expression. The track features fuzzed-out, crunchy guitars that are more akin to early My Bloody Valentine than Truckfighters as singer Sunny Faris’ voice floats serenely above the chaos. 

On tracks “Bodies” and “Spades,” guitarist Mikayla Mayhew blurts out concussive, mosh-inducing riffs that are backed by airy synth work from Sarah McKenna. It’s this constant contrast that makes the songs on Not Here Not Gone so engaging; just when you think you’ve got them figured out, they shift into a new direction. Single “Fade” finds them branching out into the vast world of post-rock with a confidence that would have you think they’ve been making songs like this for twenty years. Album interlude “Giraffe” is the band’s biggest experiment yet as they jam over a beat from Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio. The collaboration results in a slice of industrial rock that could fit in seamlessly on the tracklist of The Fragile. Despite all of these progressions, Blackwater Holylight hasn’t forgotten that, at the end of the day, they descend from Black Sabbath. This is best heard on the seven-minute closer “Poppyfields,” which weaves elements of black and doom metal and gives Eliese Dorsay an opportunity to truly beat the shit out of her drums. All of this is done in the service of creating a brooding, tension-filled piece that ends the album on a powerful note.

All of this is what makes Blackwater Holylight such an impressive band. Rather than coming out of the gates hot on their first album or two and then fizzling out in attempts to recapture that energy or flailing through desperate experimentation, the group has steadily and deftly adapted their sound. They’re the kind of band that makes you want to continue to follow their career because you’re actually excited to hear what they’ll do next, rather than clenching your jaw in hopes that they stick the landing. While Blackwater Holylight might not be a textbook desert rock or stoner doom band anymore, they fit in at Austin’s Levitation Fest as much as they do at Roadburn in the Netherlands. Blackwater Holylight refuse to be contained by the constraints or expectations of genre, charting their course on their own terms. They're far from the first musicians to do this, and they're certainly not the last, but in a genre that is loaded with copycats, they're a shining example of changing and molting until you reach the truest version of yourself. Odds are, people will recognize that and be drawn to it because when everything else can be found in excess, the things that are actually unique speak for themselves.

Connor is an English professor in the Bay Area, where he lives with his partner and their cat and dog, Toni and Hachi. When he isn’t listening to music or writing about killer riffs, Connor is reading fiction and obsessing over sports.

Ferris Wheel Regulars – Back in the Jetstream | Album Review

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Hunkofplastic Records

A few summers back, I took a trip to DC for the 2024 edition of HFStival, an attempt to revive the long-defunct fest that had been a must-stop in the late 90s and early 2000s for alt rock radio’s top bands. The 2024 lineup was made up mostly of groups that were big during the festival’s heyday—think Tonic, Lit, Filter, etc.—with Death Cab for Cutie and the Postal Service closing out the show. I mostly went to catch Postal Service and Jimmy Eat World, but neither band was at the top of my mind as I walked out of Nationals Park at the end of the night. What stuck with me were two things:

  1. People are feral (sexually) for Gavin Rossdale in a way that I did not anticipate.

  2. Incubus rule. 

I tried to push the first thought out of my head by mulling over the second. I used to love Incubus back when I was in middle school, but I totally fell off listening to them when most other people did. Seeing the band live made me regret throwing them aside, and it also got me thinking about their legacy. This was right around the time that the Deftones resurgence was at its height, where it felt like you couldn’t open Instagram without hearing a new band using them as a sonic reference point. Could something similar happen for their contemporaries in Incubus?

As 2024 turned to 2025, the answer appeared to be a resounding no, and as 2025 rolled on, that no only got louder, so I stopped thinking about it. Then, I started listening to this new Ferris Wheel Regulars record, Back in the Jetstream. When I got to track three, “Dragonflies,” and heard the opening lines “There’s no other way / To say I love you / I find it kinda strange / The way the clouds move,” a subtle pang in the vocals and the timbre of the guitars immediately brought me back to the first time I heard Morning View. This is what I was looking for. 

Before I get over my skis here, I want to make clear that I’m not trying to say that this record rises to the level of straight-up Incubus worship; Ferris Wheel Regulars are not treating Brandon Boyd the way that The Gaslight Anthem treats Bruce Springsteen. At its core, this is more of a post-hardcore record than anything else, though the record’s shoegaze and “space rock” tags on Bandcamp also make groups like Hum an easy reference to reach for. Still, there’s just so much here—the soft to loud shifts, sledgehammer distortion, the digital processing on breakdowns—that presents what I was looking for when I started hoping to see more Incubus pulls in contemporary music. It’s part of the palette in a way that’s very compelling to me. For example, “Trajectory” pulls from a similar bag of tricks as “Nowhere Fast,” from the shift in character between verse and chorus to the feedback sounds over the closing fade out. I love to see it. 

Back in the Jetstream is Ferris Wheel Regulars’ third record, but they’re a band that’s new to me, first coming onto my radar last December when I started to see hype for lead single “Wires Cut for Two” on Twitter. What most impressed me about the track when I first listened to it was that the group didn’t treat their soft sections as an afterthought. Sometimes when I listen to bands whose bread and butter is heavy/distorted guitar, it’s clear that they’re only getting softer to create contrast for contrast’s sake. Ferris Wheel Regulars are at their best when they’re noisy, but when they pull back—like on the first verse of “Wires Cut for Two”—the music is still inspired, letting the vocals shine through and leaving room for more agile guitar work. 

Where Ferris Wheel Regulars really excel though is when they fully step on it, like the closing breakdown of “Scarlet,” where screaming vocals come in to duel with the main voice line and a heavy rendition of the song’s main riff. The interlude after the first verse of “Moves Like Clouds,” with its soaring guitar lead, is another section that only sounds better the more you turn up the volume. It’s music made to make your windows shake.

Another thing that really stood out to me about this record was its thematic consistency. This is most obviously appreciated when you look at its bookends, with “Sister Star’s” refrain of “Take me out there / Somewhere Far / There’s blue out there / Somewhere far” morphing into “Take me out there / Somewhere far / Feels good nowhere / Just like stars” as the album closes with “Just Like Stars.” In between those two moments, the sky is a constant presence throughout the album, mentioned in every track, sometimes presented as a balm and other times as cold comfort. Particularly striking to me is the opening of “Simple Systems,” where we hear the lines: “You’ll see the sunrise / Winter follows mine.” There’s this economy of words that you can only really tap into when you’re laser-focused on something as universal as the sky above. Because we’re seeing the heavens hit again and again throughout the record, there’s this cumulative impact that makes that “Feels good nowhere / Just like stars” hit so incredibly hard. 

This speaks to what is perhaps my favorite thing about Back in the Jetstream, the fact that it’s a record that doesn’t wink at you. Though influences of 90s post-hardcore and 2000s alternative come through clearly in the music, there’s nothing about the presentation that’s trying to be meta about it; there’s no cutesy song titles or comedic interludes, nothing memeified. There’s room for all kinds of music with different tones and moods out there, but the straightforward and earnest approach that we see here is what resonates with me the most. Because of this approach, you get to see the music standing on its own, compelling not because it makes you feel like you’re in on something, but because someone is truly letting you in. When you do hear pieces of artists from the past poking through, it feels more reverential than referential, the sum of a lifetime of listening to music spilling out rather than a choice made to seem clever. You don’t need to be well-versed in the encyclopedia of emo to get what’s going on here; it’s just very good music that’s ready to meet you where you’re at, and you can’t really ask for much more than that. 

Josh Ejnes is a writer and musician living in Chicago. He has a blog about cassette tapes called Tape Study that you can find here, and he also makes music under the name Cutaway Car.