Butterflies Don’t Go Away: Majesty Crush’s Long-awaited Moment 

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Numero Group

I often find myself consumed by life’s “what if” moments. The chance of it all. The little things that never happened. There are different levels of “what if”—missing a train, leaving a party early, deciding to move across the country—but the sentiment remains true: in some other reality out there, there’s a version of you that is living with the repercussions of catching the train, staying at the party, or not moving. You have no idea what their life is like, and you just have to be okay with that. Most of the time, I’m not.

Some people like to think the things that are supposed to happen will happen, one way or another. Like meeting your partner on a dating app in your twenties, then learning you overlapped a few years at summer camp as kids, or finally landing the dream job you were rejected from at the start of your career. They’ll say it’s all about ‘timing’ and ‘alignment’ and ‘what the universe has in store.’ That’s too much relying on external forces for me, but I’ll admit it’s nice to relinquish control of your life for a second.

Is it obvious I was just emotionally wrecked by Past Lives? Anyway…

A lot of the time, life isn’t that simple. It’s sprawling, multifaceted, and confusing, with no direct answers or guaranteed results. Even when good things happen to us, it’s easy to nitpick what’s wrong with any given situation. But you’re still allowed to feel joy when a dream you had is finally coming to fruition.

This back-and-forth about fate versus control mirrors Majesty Crush’s journey over the last three decades. Back with a career-spanning double LP thanks to Numero Group, Butterflies Don’t Go Away combines a repress of their 1993 record Love 15 with a second disc of singles, rarities, and previously unavailable tracks. I’d argue it’s one of the most important reissues, at least in the last five years, but to understand that, we need to take a look back.

Photo By Amy Harlan

Majesty Crush is often referred to as one of the ‘forgotten’ bands of the early ‘90s shoegaze boom. The Detroit-based four-piece differentiated themselves with an innate ability to mutate from shoegaze to dream-pop to punk to grunge and back again. David Stroughter led the band as a reluctant, Syd Barrett-type frontman whose piercing vocals glided over the instrumentals, with Hobey Echlin on bass, Mike Segal on guitar, and Odell Nails III on drums. Together, they created a sweeping and all-consuming sound that made them stand out, mostly because people really couldn’t pin them down. The group quickly gained notoriety within their Midwest community, earning significant airplay on college and alternative rock radio stations. Opening for everyone from Mazzy Star and Sonic Youth to Royal Trux and The Verve, Majesty Crush seemed to be able to win over audiences in just about any scene. Yet no one could figure them out.

Majesty Crush’s mixed-race lineup made them something of an anomaly in the predominantly British shoegaze scene. It was hard to get a read of the band’s sound just by their appearance, something bassist Hobey Echlin says he thinks made the group so special in their local scene: fans had never heard anything like Majesty Crush, let alone from people that look like them. 

Immediately following the release of Love 15 in 1993, Majesty Crush’s label Dali, an Elektra subsidiary, shuttered, making it their first and only full-length LP. Here were these local legends, ready to spread their sound way outside the confines of their city, who suddenly had no backing or promotion to hold them up. Because of this, Love 15 fell through the cracks. As grunge quickly swept up the remains of a shoegaze/dream-pop scene in the US, Majesty Crush remained under the radar. The group went on to release one final EP, Sans Muscles, on their own Vulva Records before disbanding in 1995. 

Over the next 30 years, the band members split off into a disparate web of careers, including but not limited to yoga instructing, graphic design, law, and journalism. But the music remained, especially for Stroughter, who continued to record and release as P.S. I Love You, even recruiting Crush bassist Echlin to play drums on some tracks.

Eventually, the group settled in different parts of the country. In 2017, years after his last communication with anyone from Majesty Crush, David Stroughter was killed by police in El Segundo. Stroughter’s mental health continued to decline throughout the aughts, and his nomadic lifestyle made it difficult for him to regularly have access to his medications. While the LA County District Attorney deemed the police’s use of their guns lawful, the need for such force remains heavily debated, making this another case of unnecessarily escalated police violence against people of color.

And now, in 2024, Numero Group is offering listeners the most comprehensive collection of Majesty Crush music ever. In 2019, it was revealed that Stroughter had left Majesty Crush master tapes in an old roommate’s closet and had asked his sister to be the custodian of his music. Without realizing it, Stroughter left the rest of Majesty Crush (and the world) a gift he never could have anticipated. 

With this reissue, Majesty Crush’s discography is newly available to day-one fans who remember seeing them live in Detroit all those years ago, as well as newfound shoegazers hungry for more sounds. This is especially true as the shoegaze genre is enjoying a renaissance, thanks in part to TikTok, opening the door for Majesty Crush to finally get their long-deserved recognition. Some would argue that a shoegaze resurgence and social media virality was exactly what Majesty Crush desperately needed back in the ‘90s (I can see the ‘Our label closed right after our debut album dropped’ multi-part TikTok series so clearly), but it came at the price of Stroughter losing his life, prompting the discovery of these masters. Now, Stroughter isn’t here to see how many new ears have found his music and are moved by his gutturally passionate vocals and ultra-specific storytelling. It’s heartbreaking to think that Majesty Crush’s “time” came after they lost the man who tied them all together and became the beacon of their sound. 

Photo by Jack Nelson

Butterflies Don’t Go Away takes listeners on Majesty Crush’s tumultuous journey through early versions of Love 15 tracks (“No. 1 Fan - EP Version,” “Horse - EP Version,” “Purr 7” Version”), their first-ever release (“Sunny Pie”), and songs from the post-label shuttering EP Sans Muscles. Through these tracks, we see a band finding, then possibly attempting to change, their sound. The humble basement beginnings are clear on the noisiest tracks like the 7” version of “Purr” and the EP rendition of “No. 1 Fan,” but the stars align on Love 15 tracks like “Boyfriend” and “Grow.” The group’s post-label loss anguish clearly rips through Sans Muscles songs like “Seine” and “Ghost of Fun.” 

On Love 15, “Purr” is a minute-long cascade akin to Pink Floyd’s “Breathe (In the Air),” however, on the 7” rendition, we hear the song as it was originally released: as a four-minute single, complete with expansive, brain-scratching guitar textures. While the single version of “Cicciolina,” a song Stroughter wrote about an Italian porn star, is sauntering, moody, and slowed, the album version more fully encapsulates the rage-meets-desire feeling Stroughter felt for this woman, with Mike Segal’s crunchy and grating guitar, Hobey Echlin’s hypnotic bass lines, and Odell Nails’ pulsing backing rhythms propelling the track forward. 

Stroughter escalates the idea of female obsession throughout these songs, with most lyrics toeing the line of a twisted psycho-sexual fantasy. These songs are often the darkest yet poppiest tracks, which was at the heart of Majesty Crush’s approach to songwriting: take these pop sensibilities, blow them out, and then share your deepest, darkest secrets on top of them.

While researching this piece, I found myself so consumed by everything about Majesty Crush’s music and story that I eventually came into contact with bassist Hobey Echlin. I got to speak with him in March and hear his perspective on the group’s writing processes and how it feels to reenter the musical conversation. On Stroughter’s lyricism, Echlin told me, “No one could write about having a crush in such a multidimensional way.” 

“Boyfriend” starts Love 15 off with a thesis statement about torturing and killing a girl’s partner so she would fall for Stroughter instead. The scene-setting in this song alone highlights the rapid escalation of Stroughter’s internal monologue, with the opening lines explaining that he sees this beautiful girl on the train and immediately spirals into an internal dialogue of ‘Why is she with that guy when she can be with me?’ He uses his wit to prove he is superior (her boyfriend apparently can’t even get her soup order right: “He’ll bring you minestrone when you want egg drop”—Stroughter would never do that). But it doesn’t stop there: the next two songs are also about crazed feminine obsession. There’s “Uma,” presumably about actress Uma Thurman, then “No. 1 Fan,” the band’s most popular song that takes inspiration from John Hinkcley Jr.’s obsession with Jodie Foster, leading to his attempt at assassinating Ronald Reagan (depicted in on-the-nose lyrics “I’ll kill the president (For your love)”). Both tracks are all-consuming and massive; on “Uma,” Segal breaks into psychedelic guitar passes that sound like so much more than just the distortion, tremolo, and delay effects he stuck with. Meanwhile, “No. 1 Fan” completely immerses the listener into its crazed, modern-day stan POV through Stroughter’s desperate wails, Nails’ deep drum textures, and Echlin’s melodic bass tying the whole thing together. Other tracks hit on this theme, including “Seles,” “Grow,” and “Horse.” Even “Sunny Pie,” the first song Majesty Crush ever released, was about an experience with a girl working at an adult book store. 

The truest peek inside Stroughter’s mind listeners ever get in the Majesty Crush discography is “Brand,” a middle-of-the-A-side track that Echlin recently called “a step away from album filler” in an interview with Stained Glass Stories. In speaking with him, he clarified that he was mainly talking about the repetition in the instrumentation, saying, “Musically, it’s not the one with the fireworks, but lyrically, it's the most down-to-earth and personable, and it's Dave turning his lens on himself.” This track is one of my personal highlights, featuring Stroughter delivering a confessional of his everyday existence rather than spinning the narrative onto his latest craze. “I’m always so fucking drunk / I wake up with a bottle in my hands / I go to bed with a bottle touching my lips” paints the perfect picture of a man clinging to his vices to get through the day-to-day. The repetition, both lyrically and instrumentally, is overtaking, with Stroughter’s echoing vocals sweeping around listeners. These crisp deliveries also set Majesty Crush apart from the other shoegaze groups at the time: where many were mumbling through fragmented lines, Stroughter was telling a whole story, creating an entire atmosphere, and you could actually understand what he was saying. The emotions in his voice cut through your ears and go straight to your heart. “Brand,” specifically, is even more profound now as we look back, as it’s one of the most authentic looks into Stroughter’s mind that we will ever receive. 

Fundamentally, Majesty Crush wrote pop songs. The group approached songwriting in three elements: Part, Break, and Window, each time taking little liberties and twisting the structure in unique ways. Echlin compared their process to riffing off of an idea, continuing to make it better and take it farther. The most important part of a Majesty Crush song, in my opinion, is the Window: the chance for the cathartic and anthemic release that often comes at the end of their tracks. The perfect example of this songwriting approach is “Penny For Love,” a song that gives the same feeling as The Smiths doing a rendition of The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven.” One of the most straightforward tracks on the record, the up-tempo melodies and catchy guitar riffs mask the story of prostitution hidden in the lyrics. But you can hear the release in Stroughter’s vocals, the overflow and sighs he adds to lines like “Cause honey tastes so good.” Penultimate track, “Feigned Sleep,” is at the other end of this spectrum: it’s one of the most expansive tracks on the record that still utilizes the Part/Break/Window song structure. It sends the same shiver down my spine that I get when listening to something like “Jesus Christ” by Brand New, with the rhythm section acting as the song’s heartbeat. The repetitive drawl of the guitar and vocals builds a gripping intensity to the end of the song. The catharsis eventually overflows as backing vocals, drilling drum patterns, intricate bass runs, and circling guitar riffs layer on top of each other, emphasizing how Majesty Crush can take anything standardly pop and make it their own.

The tracks off of Sans Muscles see the repercussions of the post-shoegaze musical landscape Majesty Crush found themselves in by 1994. Grunge was taking over, and you can hear the pressure to be heavier on songs like “Seine,” which sounds like an alternate rendition of Nirvana’s “Scentless Apprentice.” Then there’s “Ghost of Fun,” which utilizes electronic patterns, hinting at a possible future direction the band could have taken. Left with nothing after Dali folded, Majesty Crush took out their frustrations through brooding backbeats, heavy guitars, and Dave’s aggression tying it all together. The group got meta with it, too. Take “If JFA Were Still Together,” a track that combines Deftones-esque blown-out drums juxtaposed with a melodic bass and glittering poppy guitars. Echlin says the track was their ‘what if’ moment after losing it all at the end of ‘93: “It’s kind of like, what happens when your favorite band breaks up? You lose your sense, you lose your bearings.”

“Space Between Your Moles” sounds the most like a Love 15 b-side, with lyrics even calling back to the debut as Stroughter delicately intones, “15 for you and love for the space between your moles.” The track has a Mazzy Star-type of relaxation, sounding like the closest thing Majesty Crush would ever get to a shoegaze ballad. Another instance of Majesty Crush simultaneously fitting into these rock niches and defying the category completely. Echlin says the Sans Muscles tracks were “the logical progression of Majesty Crush,” the emotionally charged next step that propelled them into this angrier sound while still keeping their shoegaze mastery close.

Butterflies Don’t Go Away perfectly encapsulates the Majesty Crush story: from noisy basement beginnings to the moments it all came together, and what happens in the aftermath of having the rug pulled out from under you. In speaking with Echlin, he told me he loves the Numero repress because it “gives just as much emphasis to the footnotes of our career as our big stuff,” offering listeners a chance to hear their trajectory in real-time. Stroughter had said, “If anything happens to me, I just want my music to be heard.” While he’s not here to see it, it’s nice to know that his music is finally reaching more ears and finding its audience. There’s now a whole new generation of shoegazers finding their solace in David Stroughter’s immersive storytelling and the sonic journey of Majesty Crush.

Cassidy is a music writer and cultural researcher currently based in Brooklyn. She loves many things, including but not limited to rabbit holes, Caroline Polachek, blueberry pancakes, her cat Seamus, and adding to her record collection. She is on Twitter @cassidynicolee_, and you can check out more of her writing on Medium.

Documenting The Void: An Interview with Heavenly Blue

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Started in the aftermath of Michigan band Youth Novel, Heavenly Blue is a seven-piece screamo/post-hardcore outfit that just issued their first release, We Have The Answer. Taking inspiration from a range of sounds in the genres of punk and hardcore, Heavenly Blue delivers an impressive collection of songs with their record. Swim Into The Sound guest writer Nick Miller recently sat down with guitarist Maya Chun and bassist Jon Riley to discuss the album, their musical influences, the band’s upcoming plans, and their love of Texas gas station food.

Heavenly Blue just got off a tour with Frail Body last month. How did that go?

Maya: It went super fucking well. I don’t think it really could’ve gone any better.

Jon: Yeah, the shows were well attended. We played with some great locals, which is always a plus. We met a bunch of pals that we hadn’t met before in person. It was cool.

In your Bandcamp bio, it says, “Screamo with dignity and integrity.” I feel like the screamo label can be sort of divisive. Some people get a little embarrassed, but Heavenly Blue seems to embrace it. What are your thoughts on “screamo?” 

Maya: Like the word and label?

The use of it. Some people are like, “I don’t know. I don’t really consider us a screamo band.” That’s kind of a standard thing you hear.

Jon: I would say it’s divisive, even internally. I personally don’t enjoy music labeled as “skramz,” but I do like bands that refer to themselves as screamo now, and I’m also into bands that referred to themselves that way in 2008. So I think it’s come full circle for me, where it’s like – okay, I like post-hardcore, metalcore, and screamo, that’s fine. I like “real screamo” screamo, that’s fine. I’m really not a big fan of “skramz,” both as a label and as a genre classifier that has a sound. I just don’t really like it. I guess some of our songs are screamo songs, some of our songs are decidedly not screamo songs. They’re way more post-hardcore. There’s some noise rock-y bits. The label screamo is kind of tongue-in-cheek, when we say, “With dignity and integrity.” It’s like a little inside joke.

How do you feel about genre labels in general? It feels like everything is a mix of different genres, so it’s kind of hard to place bands into genres today.

Maya: Especially these days, I would say a lot of music is just everything.

Jon: Yeah.

Maya: I think it’s helpful to have genre labels to understand today’s music specifically, but at the end of the day, if you don’t understand genre labels and you just listen to cool music, you’ll probably make cool music.

Jon: I think I’m similar to Maya in that I have a hard time with labels. We had this discussion on tour. What actually is “mathcore?” … I don’t think I like mathcore, and Maya says she likes mathcore. But I do like white-belt grind and Maya’s like, “Those are mathcore bands.” Now I’m thinking about the Venn diagram of mathcore. I don’t understand mathcore, and I’m not even going to pretend to understand mathcore. But then we have some songs that are kind of math-y. Like – what is that song even called?

Maya: “Looming?”

Jon: “Looming” is like seven-eight-nine-five-five-seven-eight. The counting is so messed up. I’m like, ‘Is that a mathcore song? Do I like our music? I don’t know.’

Maya: That’s just a Drew [Coughlin] song.

Jon: Yeah, it’s drummer music, and maybe that’s what we should describe it as. We have drummer music, and then we have guitarist music.

Maya: Yeah, that’s honestly more accurate, because you can tell bands like Ulcerate or Origin in the metal genre specifically – it’s all about the drummer in those fucking bands. And then you have other bands like, I don’t know – Necrophagus or fucking Brain Drill is obviously all about the guitars.

Jon: I think maybe we start the Venn diagram at guitarist music [versus] drummer music and then go from there. But I actually do think genres are helpful in just understanding where people see their allegiances. I think when a band tells me what genre they are, it’s more interesting for me not because I’m trying to be like, “You’re not a real screamo band.” But it’s like, “Oh, but you listen to that stuff, and those are the things you’re influenced by, and now when I’m listening to your music, I’m listening for the things you like.” I think that’s kind of how I think about it – genre’s just like your influences now because everything is everything.

When you’re writing music, are you conscious of what your influences are, or do you let it sit subconsciously and figure it out later?

Jon: I personally only write music after I’ve been listening to other music. I never just wake up in the morning and have a riff in my head. I’m always listening to an Unwound song, and I’m like, “Oh, the way that song builds and everything is chaos and catharsis – I would want to do that for a Heavenly Blue song,” and I kind of use that motif as a starting point… I’m not taking notes or even riffs or whatever, I’m mostly just taking musical concepts and motifs, and seeing how I can interpret them in our musical lexicon.

Maya: It’s sort of a mix for me. Obviously, we were just on tour for Frail Body for two weeks, and a couple of days ago – it was just a regular afternoon after I came home from work. I’m just playing guitar, and I’m like, “I have an idea.” And I write, for the first time in months, a song that’s like two-thirds Frail Body and one-third Nuvolascura, because I just love Nuvolascura. I think I get exposed to stuff and it influences me subconsciously, but then I’ll just randomly have an idea.

Talking about We Have The Answer, what do you feel like your influences were?

Maya: I think we all had a lot of pretty different influences coming into that record. … A fair amount of the guitar parts on that record are –

Jon: They’re holdovers from Youth Novel. Some John Dickinson riffs.

Maya: Yeah, John Dickinson wrote some riffs with us and sent them over following the release of the Youth Novel record, and I built songs around them, along with some older riffs. But for other parts of the record, I regularly take a lot of guitar influence, at least, from At The Drive-In and The Fall Of Troy, I guess as a quote-unquote lead guitarist or whatever.

Jon: Our drummer writes songs on drums, which is pretty different from most bands. There’s a few songs [like that] on the record. If you listen to the record, you’ll know which ones they are, because it’s very apparent. The drummer will write a drum song, and then we come in later. Maya writes guitars and we kind of workshop it and change the structure a little bit to make it more musical “song structure” sense. Because drummers have Drummer Brain and just want to drum, so you have to help them write songs. And then Kris, me, and Drew kind of jammed together, and we sort of talk about stuff as like – “Okay, so this song is ‘Screamo Banger.’” And that’s the way we think about that collection of riffs and parts. It’s all part of this song that’s loosely defined as “Screamo Banger.”

Maya: I barely remember what the actual name of it is. I just know it as “Screamo Banger.”

Jon: We have codes for all of our songs.

Can you tell me which one “Screamo Banger” is?

Jon and Maya: “...And Like That, A Year Had Passed.”

Photo by Kyle Caraher

Let’s talk about the Metal Frat at the University of Michigan. Is that where you two met?

Jon: We met on a Facebook group, but yeah.

Maya: Because of Metal Frat.

What did you learn from your time living there or just being around there?

Jon: I know all the different types of mold. The types of mold that can hurt you and the types of mold that you can cohabitate with.

Maya: I know how to shotgun a beer in less than a second.

Jon: I know how to book a show. I think I learned how to do that there.

Maya: The pedal board that I built there is still the one I have.

Jon: Learned how to live in difficult situations. One of the things living in an environment like that teaches you – it’s actually good training for being in a band. You might not always get along with your close cohabitants, and you often have to learn how to make it work in creative ways. I think that has made being in a band with so many people easier for me and Maya specifically, because we’re used to living with 24 people, sometimes more.

Maya: Sometimes I forget that. It’s just like – yeah, I used to live with 20 fucking people.

Maya, you recorded and mixed much of the album. What were your goals going in? Did you have an idea of what you wanted it to sound like specifically?

Maya: The drums for seven of the songs were recorded in Baltimore when Drew was still living there. The remaining three or four songs we recorded here in different capacities. Due to the nature of how we recorded it, because it’s hard to get seven people in a room together, I think I just wanted it to sound as good as I could. And I think I also have a pretty distinct idea of what sounds good at the end of the day, and I think that’s born from listening to a lot of metal and maybe idolizing Devin Townsend in my early years, and loving “Wall of Sound” production. I just like things to sound big; I like things to sound live. I guess my ideal mix is the perfect live show experience. I can be both very forgiving and very picky about how I do that, which I why I spent like three months agonizing over the mix every day, for many hours every day. I really like mid-2000s Kurt Ballou. I really like fucking Adam from Killswitch [Engage]’s mixes of all those early metalcore records, like Norma Jean’s, Bless The Martyr and shit. I just like those dirty-ass, hard-hitting, stupid records. And I also played djent in the 2010s, so I can’t escape that either, I suppose.

What is your background in audio engineering?

Maya: I was self-taught from middle and high school. I was just on the internet, I didn’t have friends in real life, and I liked progressive metal. So I really didn’t have anything else to do other than just make music in my room alone.

Jon: I’m gonna interject and say Maya made quite possibly the best post-rock metal record of the 2010s when she was in early high school.

Maya: I did no such thing.

Jon: She lies to you.

Maya: It’s a prog record.

Jon: It’s a prog record but it’s actually great. It was one of the things where I was like, “This person has to join Metal Frat because one – you can record Youth Novel. Two – the record, it was better than anything I’ve ever done to this day. 

Maya: That’s not true.

Jon: It’s true.

What’s it called?

Jon: The project was called Goodthink, and the record is called Ascend. Is that right?

Maya: That’s correct. I released that in the summer of my senior year, just about to go into college.

Jon: That’s in writing, Maya. Everyone who reads this is gonna go listen to that record, and they’re gonna be like, “Wow.”

Maya: No, they’re not. They’re gonna listen to the first record and be like, ‘What is this Dream Theater bullshit?’

Jon: Maya’s magnum opus.

Maya: It was definitely my magnum opus at the time, in high school. Yeah. And that was 11 years ago.

Jon: Sorry to derail your question. Maya sells herself short. She’s been very good at audio engineering for a long time.

Maya: Then I went to U of M and did the Performing Arts Technology program, which is essentially their audio engineering program, for a few years. Now I’m here.

Do you think you’re going to keep recording the band?

Maya: Unless a lot of money is handed to us, with the condition being Maya doesn’t record the band, then sure, yeah. I’d like to, because I just like to. 

Let’s talk about the album art. Where did that come from?

Jon: So that was me. … It’s an interesting story. We kind of went back and forth on a lot of concepts for the album, just in terms of how the songs made us feel, or what are the types of imagery that kind of encapsulate both the lyrical and sonic content. God, I sound like I’m being a dick. I kind of feel like an asshole. You can tell I went to art school. So anyway, I kind of bounced a bunch of ideas off people. The things that kind of stood out were [that] it feels brutal and dense and kind of obstructive. It feels like it’s just in the way of something, but you don’t know what. It’s just like a rock in the middle of the road. It feels impactful. But then other people were like, “It makes me feel de-personified and absent, like the void.” So I kind of looked for a bunch of themes, and one of the things that stood out to me was the desert. And Maya’s like, “This is not a desert album.” And I was like, “It’s not a desert album.” Still think it was a great concept.

Maya: It’s not a desert album.

Jon: It’s not a desert album. 

Maya: We ain’t Kyuss.

Jon: We could be, though.

Maya: We’re not Kyuss. 

Jon: I’m telling you, Maya. The stoner rock arc is the next record, for sure.

Maya: I don’t think so.

Jon: Anyway… I kind of started to do some digging into the archives on those themes, and I found this photograph from 1960s San Francisco political organizing. I’m not gonna mention who the person in the photo is. That’s part of the purpose of obscuring their face – so you don’t know. It is a person from the San Francisco Bay Area who was integral in moving forward progressive politics in that time period. We obscured all the faces from that image in hopes that you understood that de-personification that we were feeling when we listened to it or when we wrote it… There are some other elements to the art, specifically the layout. The physical record has one of the alternative covers that I looked at, which is a person performing a ballet dance on a stage from the exact same event that you’re looking at in the first image. Part of it has to do with – you don’t know who these people are, you don’t know what the event is, but they’re obviously doing an evocative act. This is a performance of some sort. And that’s kind of how I view the record. I don’t know how people are going to describe it, but I know that they’ll kind of have a hard time. But you’ll listen to it. You have to kind of engage with it. You have to work through the songs to hopefully get what we were trying to do. … Oh, and the cross. This is the last thing I’ll say.

Maya: Oh, yeah.

Jon: Part of it was like, “What if we name the record We Have The Answer and put a cross on the cover? Are we a Christian band?” That was one of the things we kind of joked about. … But also, I’m personally interested in text-based design, and I like when people break conventions with text in a design. So I was trying to go for something that kind of mimicked the image. So if you look at the cover, you’ll see the person on the stage with this hand pose, and the text is supposed to kind of be a mirror image of that just in the shape of everything. It’s purely aesthetic, is what I’m saying. It’s not Christianity.

Are you going to put out lyrics with the album?

Maya: I think we are, yeah.

Jon: I know that they are in the liner knows. I don’t know if they’re going to make it [online]. … They are in the liner notes with the exception of some lyrics that we have withheld from the song “Certain Distance,” because some of those lyrics were written by the first vocalist of Heavenly Blue. We’ve already gone through one vocalist. That’s our friend Nathan. Nathan didn’t want to be in a band anymore. Nathan’s a spiritual member. 

I’m fascinated with sequencing and how people come up with that. Can you talk about how you decided on the order of the tracks? Was that carefully thought through?

Maya: I think usually I’m generally the one who does it. I’ll bring a certain tracklist to the band and be like, “What do you guys think of this?” And everyone will give their input and we’ll change it. We’ll have another tracklist and if we like that, we’ll go with it, or if we don’t like it, we’ll make some more changes.

Jon: With this record, I think Maya was intimately familiar with the songs.

Maya: That’s every record!

Jon: But this one specifically because you mixed it for three months straight.

Maya: How long – we worked on the Youth Novel record for seven years.

Jon: You worked on the Youth Novel record for seven years. I worked on the Youth Novel record for a total of three weeks. Anyway… I think there is an arc to the sequencing. The way that it sort of goes, which is kind of funny, is it goes in chronological order of how the songs were written.

Maya: Pretty closely, yeah.

Jon: So you kind of see the creative process of this band forming in this record. The first couple songs are all Youth Novel holdovers.

Maya: That plus riffs that John Dickinson wrote after the Youth Novel LP.

Jon: And then there’s the drummer songs, which are the middle of the record, and … kind of like a junction. Drew actually recorded drums for those songs before the songs were completed. Just recorded drums at the studio because we paid for studio time.

Maya: I had written the songs around it by that time, but they weren’t done.

Jon: The last three or four songs me, Kris, and Drew wrote together in a collaborative way, the skeleton of, and Maya took it into a DAW [digital audio workstation] and finished. That’s kind of how the sequencing came to be. I do think there’s kind of an arc of more melodic content at the beginning, and then it goes into more math-y, abrasive content in the middle, and then this build-up and fall-off for the last two tracks. I think there is a sequence. I don’t know if it was as intentional as most people because we didn’t sit down and write this record in a month. This record took two years, so it was a long process.

How do you see the writing process changing going forward, now that you sort of have a base?

Maya: We’re out of Youth Novel riffs. No more.

Jon: I’m ready for our new stuff because I do think it sounds a lot more like us, like the people in the room who are making the music. We got together and went to a cabin in Port Hope, Michigan [in] the thumb of Michigan. … [We] got together for a weekend, hung out, and wrote five or six songs. Parts for songs. They’re not done, but –

Maya: That, plus everything else we have – we have like 47 minutes of raw material for the next record.

Jon: We have a lot that we are toying with. I’m excited to start the next record.

Heavenly Blue is playing a couple of festivals this summer. Will you be touring on the way there?

Maya: Four shows, including PUG Fest.

Jon: Yeah, we’re doing a slew of shows with Dreamwell. … That’s gonna be fun. Good band. They put out a good record last year. And then we’re playing some shows before New Friends Fest with an unannounced band that I’m not gonna name yet. We’re gonna wait a little bit longer. We are gonna be playing with Flooding again, I think. We love Flooding. Best band ever. We got to play with Flooding for three dates on this last Frail Body tour. We’re hoping to play some shows with them because they’re also playing New Friends and we love their music. And they’re also sweet people. And we might have some other stuff coming at the end of the year.

What do you like to eat on the road?

Maya: Buc-ee’s

Jon: We fell in love with Buc-ee’s on the road.

I don’t know if I’ve ever heard of Buc-ee’s. Is it a Texas thing?

Jon: It’s a Texas thing.

Maya: Yeah, it’s like a big, old truck stop, except there’s no trucks allowed.

Jon: It’s a truck stop without the trucks. It’s amazing.

Maya: They have a whole deli bar kind of thing for just jerky. They have fresh-made BBQ sandwiches. They have burritos. It’s basically like gas station food but cranked up to the absolute max, and also in Texas. 

Jon: Everything’s bigger. I know they say everything’s bigger in Texas, but the sandwiches are enormous.

Maya: They were fucking good.

Jon: The cost-to-weight value of food there is unreal.

Maya: You can’t get a BBQ sandwich [in Michigan] that good.

Jon: Buc-ee’s is the best Texas gas station. I would say the other things we do for food – I don’t know, we try not to eat like absolute garbage. The band tries to buy people good food once a day because you gotta eat well to live a quality life, and we try to take that seriously. On this [last] tour, the band paid for everyone’s meals and we tried to buy ourselves good food. We love Taco Bell, too, especially for the vegetarians. 

Maya: We’ve got some vegetarian/vegan people, so we usually have to take that into account. Most of us will eat whatever.

Nick Miller is a freelance writer from Ypsilanti, Michigan, primarily writing about the world of professional wrestling. He also enjoys playing music, reading, tabletop RPGs, and logging Letterboxd entries (AKA watching movies). You can find him on X at @nickmiller4321 or on Instagram at @nickmiller5678. 

Um, Jennifer? – The Girl Class | EP Review

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Final Girl Records

It’s an unspoken rule that if you are a queer person who wants to be taken seriously as a purveyor of modern rock music, you should be miserable. It doesn’t necessarily have to be abject misery: melancholy, disaffection, and unrequited longing will suffice. This was as true of Melissa Etheridge’s wailing lamentations that she’s “the only one who’ll drown in [her] desire for you” in 1993, down to the three boys genius combining the strength of their collective ennui to Grammy-winning success more recently. From Tegan & Sara, to Perfume Genius, to Girlpool, and Ethel Cain, this much is true: to succeed as a queer rock musician, you must be willing to bleed.

I’m hopeful, dear reader, that you can not only recognize hyperbole but forgive it as well.

To say there has never been a happy queer rock act would be patently untrue. One of the very first rock stars, queer or otherwise, was Little Richard, who built his career on frenetic party bangers. Classic rock stalwarts Elton John and Freddie Mercury famously brought queer joie de vivre to everything they ever did. Even Rob Halford has a sort of playfulness–at least, as much playfulness as his subgenre allows for. But listening to Um, Jennifer’s new EP, The Girl Class, had me wondering when the last time I heard a rock band be this queer and this effervescent at the same time.

“Girl Class,” the title track, opens the EP with a throwback to late 90s/early 00s alternative rock: the answering machine message–not just an answering machine message, but the dialing of a rotary phone (in this, the year of our lord, two-thousand-and-twenty-four) that goes DIRECTLY to the machine after one ring.

I’m packing my bags for Camp Nostalgia.

I love this motif, and it’s used to great effect. Our singer, Fig, introduces themself and delivers the thesis statement of the song to the person they’re calling: “I’m having a lot of trouble being a girl, and you’re really good at being a girl, and I was wondering if you wanted to hang out, or we could get coffee or something, or whatever, yeah, give me a call back.” What follows is an ode to friendship and self-acceptance that concludes with actual, fool-proof instructions on how to be a girl: “Step 1: say you’re a girl; Step 2: you are a girl.”

On “Glamor Girl,” our second vocalist, Eli, moves in a different direction. They take an outside perspective on how a devastatingly sexy lady is driving them crazy and ruining their life. This theme continues with a later track, “Cut Me Open,” where Eli addresses someone who has them consumed with desire to the point that they want to be torn open and cannibalized by them: a universal experience I’m sure we can all relate to.

Something I really like about this band is the salty/sweet dynamic between the two singers. Eli’s songs are characterized by a frank and expressive discussion of sexuality, while Fig’s are more whimsical. For example, in “Jazz Machine,” Fig describes their paramour as a sort of fabulous intergalactic entity, a “roller rink jazz machine,” and still somehow very human, with insecurities and an absolutely filthy bedroom.

Photo by Avery Davis

The unifying factor between these two collaborators seems to be a willingness to just let things be fun and unserious. In fact, one could say that the overarching theme for this collection of songs is affirming the things that make you feel insecure don’t have to be the end of the world unless you treat them that way.

It's this sense of levity that really distinguishes Um, Jennifer from other, perhaps more established artists talking about their queer experience. Their willingness to say, “I’m not feeling all that great about myself, and I’m painfully horny,” while treating that like a hilarious anecdote, really sets them apart from queer singer/songwriters who would say the same thing and treat it as a dirge. Not to diminish either method, both are valid, but the lighthearted approach makes them feel distinct in the moodier musical landscape of 2024.

It also goes without saying that being witty and self-effacing is just naturally more inviting. It makes people want to like you and want to relate to you. Um, Jennifer is extremely charming in this way. This is a band that pitched the release party for this EP as “an exhilarating night of trans slut rock,” further describing the theme as “inspired by Jennifer’s Body - blood, guts, and being really hot.” I don’t know about you, but that sounds like my kind of party: they sound like the kind of people I want to be friends with, and I think this approach will win them many fans.

When it comes down to it, it’s no secret that we, as queer people, often face a lot of harrowing circumstances, a lot of sadness, and a lot of loneliness and inner turmoil. Likewise, it’s a well-documented fact that channeling hardship into creativity can generate powerful works of art. I think it speaks volumes about the way we're feeling in the current political climate that so many queer musicians are writing tons of sad songs. I think it’s important to acknowledge this. But I also think it’s important to see the joy in your queerness, to find the humor in it, and to celebrate it. So, in that way, I think we have really needed a band like this loud, funny, over-the-top duo of trans kids from Brooklyn to remind us that it’s okay to let loose and be ridiculous every once in a while.

Brad Walker is a writer, comedian, and storyteller from Columbus, Ohio. Find him on the World Wide Web:@bradurdaynightlive on Instagram and@bradurdaynightlive.bsky.social on Bluesky.

Carpool – My Life in Subtitles | Album Review

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SideOneDummy

After working in several movie theaters throughout college, I've spent my fair share of time in projection booths. My favorite was filled floor to ceiling with old movie posters, each haphazardly taped on top of the other, with the oldest posters just barely peeking out behind the latest. The shelves were filled with odd memorabilia (Jurassic Park dinosaurs, B-list celebrity standees, promotional shirts for forgotten A24 films), and the lights were permanently low. 

Carpool’s latest album, My Life in Subtitles, takes me back to that projection booth. The Rochester band’s sophomore album captures the feeling you get watching a movie through a small glass window—the sensation of watching something bigger than you, something that excludes you, but something you still can peer in on. Projection booths are niche liminal spaces, rooms caught between an audience and invisibility. Like the complexities of the projection booth, this album operates from above, crafting story and sound from a secluded vantage point, and that all starts on the first track. 

Following a melancholy piano introduction, Carpool throws the listener directly into their lead single, “Can We Just Get High?,” a song the band dubbed the spiritual successor to their 2020 entry to the emo canon, “The Salty Song.” On the surface, “Can We Just Get High?” is a full-force rocker that feels like the rush of a sweaty beer pong win. The song has an anthemic quality that makes it feel like the performance a hot new pop-punk band would blast through at a house party during their minute-long cameo in a 2000s dramedy. The track practically demands to be chanted along with, featuring a binary chorus of, “Love me / hate me / can we just get high?” The band intersperses that kinetic energy with musical tricks that push the entire song into overdrive — extended guitar notes, signature Carpool screams, and a solo from lead guitarist Tommy Eckerson that flows like a knocked-over Miller High Life. 

In the music video, the band leans into the chaos through a disorienting backyard rager and a well-placed Animal House reference executed by bassist Torri Ross. Directors Kevin Flanagan and Christian Payment capture the surreal panic of the song through a musical fantasia of beers in the tub, high-stakes poker, and falling into a pool with your suit and tie on. The band followed this video up with one for “Open Container Blues,” a slightly more mournful track with a stunning feature from Briana Wright of Cliffdiver. While the song balances on frustration and tragedy, the video intersperses lyrics with glowing footage of the band’s joint tour in the summer of 2023. A joyous reminder that at the end of the day, Carpool will always be for sharing smiles with friends. 

The final music video released for My Life In Subtitles was for “CAR,” a post-hardcore departure from Carpool’s typical pop-tinged emo sound. With this tonal shift in music came an accompanying change in visuals. Directors Kevin Flanagan and Christian Payment moved away from the absurdity of “Can We Just Get High” and the camaraderie of “Open Container Blues” for something darker – a nightmare designed to knock listeners off-kilter and keep them on their toes. Soundtracked by his own screaming, the video depicts lyricist/vocalist/guitarist Stoph Colasanto trapped on the roof of a building and being chased through a parking garage by cloaked cult figures. For an album as thematically broad as My Life in Subtitles, the diverse array of genres and emotions depicted through the music videos do a good job representing the vast emotional complexities found throughout these songs.

Between the first stretch of songs of this album, I found myself asking, what does it mean to feel doomed? Not be doomed; just feel it. This theme is familiar territory in Carpool’s lyricism; their debut album, Erotic Nightmare Summer, was tinged with this urgency and pangs of frustration. The band’s follow-up EP, 2022’s For Nasal Use Only, offered a synthier, sunnier companion to the TV-static melancholy of ENS. It also provided a five-song glimpse into Carpool’s growing sonic capabilities, suggesting that the band was ready to fly.

Perhaps no one understands that sensation of soaring doom more than Icarus, the mythological boy who flew too close to the sun in search of freedom. Shifting away from broken-in emo and power-chord pop found in the opening stretch of the album, “Kid Icarus” sits comfortably in the middle of the record as a highly visual song with a winding, stadium-like delivery. It’s a song that takes up the whole room, with Stoph Colasanto envisioning himself as Icarus, affirming that, “If I could fly towards the sun, I would fly towards the sun.” Not to be confused with soaking up the sun, don’t get it twisted. Like many Carpool songs, the music and lyrics weave two conflicting emotions, in this case, an aerial melody paired with free-falling notions of self-doubt. That tangible longing and sense of closeness with something just out of reach echoes my projection booth memories. Do you join the crowd? Or do you keep your turmoil to yourself?

Of all the tracks on the album, “Thom York New City” was the song I found myself replaying the most: listening to it in the still of the night, listening to it while lying flat on my back and staring at the ceiling, listening to it while walking home from seeing friends. “Thom Yorke New City” is a hell of a final act. Lyrically, it illustrates the repetitive balancing act of choosing to look on the bright side even though that bright side is never guaranteed to happen, moving forward with a knowing and predicated voice. Sonically, it mirrors the flight patterns of “Kid Icarus” and calls back to the comfort of prior Carpool songs with a song-shifting drum fill from drummer Alec Westover.

 But that can’t be where this album stops, so it isn’t. Instead, My Life in Subtitles ends on punctuation, a small button in the form of “Every Time I Think of You I Smile.” This is the musical equivalent of the lights slowly coming up in a theater as the credits roll. After an album full of contemplating what it means to feel doomed in your own life despite your best efforts, this final track relies on memory to offer evidence that the doom isn’t forever and that the sky will clear eventually. This song bookends the opening titular track, forming an infinite loop of gray uncertainty turning into wavering assuredness, and then back again.

The credits end, and I am left in the projection booth, accompanied by the soft clicking of the projector. I turn it off, stretch my legs, and leave to get the broom to sweep up popcorn, reflecting on what I had just watched. I feel as if I have truly witnessed a full story play out through this album, one chronicling the ups and downs of Stoph Colasanto’s recent life and the distance between reality and subtitles—the difference between what’s said and what’s shown. 

From my view in the projection booth, I can feel the atmosphere created by this album. I immediately knew the script, the characters, and the setting, but I also didn’t know them at all because I was only watching from afar. Years of songwriting, musical experimentation, and life have gone into this record. While other Carpool projects have looked back or yearned forward, My Life in Subtitles looks from above. This is an album where the entire band soars. With its earnest lyricism, acrobatic guitar solos, and genre-shifting delivery, My Life in Subtitles is an album with altitude.

Caro Alt’s (she/her) favorite thing in the world is probably collecting CDs. Caro is from New Orleans, Louisiana and spends her time not sorting her CD collection even though she really, really needs to.

Barely Civil – I'd Say I'm Not Fine | Album Review

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Take This To Heart Records

How are you doing? Like, how are you really doing? This is a question that terrifies me, especially if it’s asked by someone who doesn't just want to make polite chit-chat.

To answer my own question, I’m not doing that great! To be honest, I’m depressed and stressed out. And I’m fully aware of how depression manifests in me: it’s less that I feel like I’m sad and more that I feel so exhausted I can't even be bothered with anything. It’s a lack of hope that things will get better, so I just either cruise or self-destruct. That’s how I’m doing right now, to be real. I’m coasting, mostly, but I want to get better.

Milwaukee emo band Barely Civil is familiar with this reality. Each song on their third LP, I’d Say I’m Not Fine, attempts to answer the question, “How are you doing? Really?” 

The sound of the drums is deafening.
I can’t take your questions at this time.
Alive in the sense that I’m not dead.
I think I would say that I’m not fine.

When asked about the lyrical themes, lead singer Connor Erickson said, “We had to, obviously, take a break when everybody else did for COVID. And the sort of pent-up frustration and aggression that came with losing your job, and losing the friendships that you have, and trying to pick up those relationships, virtually over the phone, and then try and figure out how to how to piece those back together, I started to feel like a lot of the people that I cared a lot for sort of stopped caring about me. And not in a way where I’m bitter about it, but in a way where it was just like, wow, this is the reality of the world we live in.”

Staying still now, there’s a bad man,
he’s stealing my wage.
I hope that he dies soon.
How else will I pay back my rent?
I’m taking a long walk, try to cool off,
does that make much sense?

It makes sense to me, my guy! I am also run through with a sense of exhaustion and ennui. I am trying my best, showing up faithfully to the friends around me, and mostly trying hard at work and in my other obligations. But I am tired, man. And almost everybody I know feels this way. 

Calm down. Everyone’s got doubts.

Barely Civil is Connor Erickson (vocals, guitar), Eric Doucette (bass, vocals), Alex Larsen (guitar), and Isaac Marquardt (drums).

Let me stop and say that I like Barely Civil a lot. They are the sort of band that I’ve always wanted to be in. They are aggressive, melodic, catchy as hell, and grounded in thoughtful lyrics. I rank Barely Civil with some of my favorite bands who are accomplishing this same level of poetic and musical excellence: Manchester Orchestra, mewithoutYou, Valleyheart, The World Is A Beautiful Place… Speaking of which, TWIABP’s own Chris Teti recorded and produced this record, as well as the band’s last album, 2020's I'll Figure This Out. 

Barely Civil are writing about real shit and recording music that sounds so good and fun and heavy and heartfelt. This album makes me ask myself: what do I do with the feeling of “I’m not fine”? Where does it come from? How can I move forward as if my life was a redemptive story? 

In my experience, a breakthrough is really only possible on the other side of a breakdown. Wholeness and healing only show themselves to those who are desperate enough to want to see them. Nobody builds an appetite for a better world unless they become thoroughly disgusted with the world as it is. 

And there’s plenty to be disgusted at: Working class pain. Cost of living. The feeling of loneliness that results from carrying hurt that’s invisible to others. A society that rewards unkindness. The death of childlike dreams. The pain of showing up for friends that don’t show up for you. The knowledge that you’re being taken advantage of by your bosses, by your landlord, by the system. 

There’s a desperation that manifests in anger. Where do you direct it? Smoke another cigarette? Crush another six-pack? Distract yourself again with the television or the computer? Speak unkindly to your loved ones? 

Where does relief come from? From which direction? From outside or in? What do you do with the anger in the bottom of your belly that just lives there all the time? 

If I could breathe again,
I swear I would breathe again,
I swear I would.

Barely Civil doesn’t totally give us any advice about what to do with all our frustration and disappointment, and that’s appropriate! All my favorite artists ask good questions and don’t put too much pressure on themselves to tie it up with a bow by the last track. But there are hints:

Right now I’m finding out
what it takes to feel let down.
How to take that and swallow it down.
It’s a process, but I digress.
I’m shaping a town of stone.
It’s a new age, a singing bowl.
It’s a belly ache, a cosmic drone.
Wait, there’s that sound again.

The cosmic drone! The ancient sound from before the beginning of the world! The ineffable, the unexplainable, the unknown! Maybe there’s something there.

I’m learning to speak in tongues again.
I’m burning the candle at both ends.

I’m not sure where that breakthrough is coming from, but I, personally, really hope to experience one. It would be nice to feel like I’m in relationships where care is mutual and reciprocated, not just one-sided. It would be nice to be able to comfortably afford rent in the city I live in. Would be sick to feel like I’m able to find some answers to these lingering questions.

If a breakthrough is really on the other side of a breakdown, maybe I’m not actually in a bad spot. Regardless, it would be a nice surprise to be asked, “How are you doing?” and legitimately say, “I’m fine, actually! Things are getting better!”

Ben Sooy lives in Denver, Colorado, where he writes songs and plays guitar with his best friends in the band A Place For Owls.