Leisure Hour – The Sunny Side | Album Review

Refresh Records

I have been trying to write this piece since before The Sunny Side was released. The reason I struggled is that I found myself becoming too earnest when discussing this album, as many of the topics depicted are things that I have lived through. Throughout these 34 minutes, Leisure Hour confront the realities of life in a way that hits uncomfortably close to home, with the trio addressing everything from struggling to pay rent to major instances of loss. The Sunny Side is a masterclass in breaking down universal feelings to their atoms and giving those feelings a reassuring new package.

Despite the unique heaviness of these topics, Leisure Hour remain unflinchingly positive throughout their debut LP, whether that shines through with soaring guitars that make you want to dance or sing-along “woahs” that feel primed to be belted out in sweaty basements and dive bars. It is impossible to listen to this album and remain truly sad, despite one notable, absolutely heartbreaking example I promise to tell you all about later. The Muncie, Indiana three-piece consists of guitarist/vocalist Isaiah Neal, bassist/vocalist Grace Dudas, and drummer Raegan Gordon, who come together to create 11 songs filled with rambunctious indie rock energy. 

The Sunny Side begins with “Rent’s Due,” and this song is the perfect way to start as it sets the tone and stakes with an immediate “Oh the fucking rent is due / I check my bank account / and the funds start to run / with their unlaced shoes.” These lines are sung in a rather whimsical way over a bouncy guitar riff that immediately opens up into some fun percussion, which drives the heart of most Leisure Hour songs. This song also acts as a duet between Dudas and Neal, who jump back and forth between verses as they sing about the power of staying together despite strife. The highlight of the song is a solo in which Dudas sings, “I just wanted you to know that I fucking love you / even when the rent is due,” which builds up as vocals from Neal are layered over swelling drums before finally opening up into a pop-punk-fueled ending. 

Acceptance is a central theme throughout the album and appears throughout songs like “Forgiveness,” a pop-punk banger track on which Dudas takes the lead vocals. This song explores the nature of coming to terms with your own personal limit of forgiveness. In “Part of Me,” Neal puts forth an emo ballad grappling with the nature of growing up and being alone.  Perhaps the best example of this theme is in “Ivy Tech,” one of the more emo-tinged singles from Leisure Hour’s self-titled EP that made it onto the album, and it is clear why. Aside from being impossibly catchy, “Ivy Tech” articulates the idea that everyone you love will die and then turns it around, pointing out that the fact that life ends is exactly what makes it beautiful. We, by nature, are perishable, and that makes these silly little breaths we take worth something. 

However, the air we breathe is a lot sweeter when you have someone to share it with, and Leisure Hour is more than happy to put forth a collection of love songs to remind us of that fact. Songs like “All of the Time,” “I Don’t Want This To End,” and “Am I Just Dead?” showcase the “fireworks” type of love that is explosive and inherent at the beginning of a relationship. It is that feeling when you just can’t believe what you have and all you want to do is be arm-in-arm.

The album is closed by a one-two punch that I have coined an “earnestness encore.” It begins with “Water Loves the Sunset,” and it barely feels like hyperbole when I say I find this song to be the most wholesome and intimate love song I have ever heard. The entire track is without percussion and features only a simple acoustic guitar part and distorted, echo-y duet vocals from Neal and Dudas. The song approaches the idea of holding a deep love despite not being close in proximity yet still feeling an endless pull toward each other. The water will always be pulled toward the shore, and once you feel a love like this, you yearn to be pulled right back in.

I personally view the closing track on any album as something almost holy in nature. The final song is the note you leave everything on, and The Sunny Side features one of the greatest closers I have ever heard. The conclusion of this album is “The Glow,” and this particular song is hard for me to write about because the themes are something that I have experienced first-hand. The song begins, “I was at your graduation / but you forgot to come.” The first time I heard the beginning lines of this song, I immediately broke into tears as a friend of mine passed away in high school, and images of watching her family walk the stage for her diploma played in my head, and they continued to haunt me for a while as I had run from these emotions for years. This song forced me to finally look into myself and find a way to move forward despite the grief I hid from. If I had to ascribe a single word to tell you what “The Glow” is as a song, that word would be important. Even if you hadn’t lived this story, I assure you that you will not escape this track without being overcome with emotion. I don’t know how to hear a song where you take one of the worst things to occur in your life and turn it into a beautiful gospel of positivity. 

The Sunny Side is a cohesive debut from a young Indiana band that inspires hope for their future as a band and the future as a whole. Each song on this album feels like it could be played on any sized stage and leave the crowd dancing and singing along. It can’t be understated what Leisure Hour has been able to accomplish on their first record. They’ve honed a polished sound that is deeply entrenched in a distinctly human feeling. At the end of the day, all we want to be is better, and Leisure Hour show us that we can be. 

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Ben Parker is an emo kid from a small town in Indiana who has spent a little too much time reflecting on life. Ben is a poet and has written about topics ranging from death to addiction to that feeling when you meet someone, and once you part, you realize you’ll never speak again. Ben can be found at @Benyamin_Parker on all social media.

Delta Sleep – Blue Garden | Album Review

Wax Bodega

If you look at practically any era of human history, the one constant is conflict. The difference between years past and present is our immediate access to that conflict at any given moment. A harrowing number of atrocities can be viewed almost in real-time with the swipe of a finger, and it can be hard not to let it all crash down on you. Like many others, I tend to use music as a sort of umbrella to protect myself from the torrential downpour of bad news. While art can be used as a form of escape, its primary function is to spark engagement with listeners and examine ideas in our world that might otherwise be left to the wayside. That’s where UK-based rock outfit Delta Sleep’s latest record, Blue Garden, thrives, as its intellectual form is ready to invite listeners into some conversations they may not be expecting.

Blue Garden is unequivocally Delta Sleep’s heaviest album to date, with harrowing lyrical depictions in the songwriting and grungier instrumentation than records past. The first offering from the record came in the form of a mini-documentary for Blue Garden’s opener, “Dawn,” which blends archival footage and modern sources to depict the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The video is underscored by the stripped-back, atmospheric track, with lyrics such as “Can’t say that you're a leader when there's bloodshed in your sight,” taking aim at the systems that allow the continuing genocide to happen.

In the context of the album, “Dawn” lands a successful one-two punch with a flawless transition into the much more bombastic “Slow Burn.” Lyrically, there’s a sense of despair that permeates in vocalist Devin Yüceil’s delivery in both tracks, but while “Dawn” makes a direct attack on those turning a blind eye to the atrocities of the modern world, “Slow Burn” becomes an introspective examination of the helplessness and the guilt that we all feel. The duality of these opening tracks acts as a compelling juxtaposition of stasis and how it manifests in our internal workings, depending on whether or not we choose to accept it.

The guitar tones, especially on the front half of the record, are coated with a light sheen of distortion and fuzz, with tracks like “Slow Burn” and “Toe Stepper” feeling more adjacent to grunge and shoegaze than Delta Sleep’s previously bread and butter of math rock. There are certainly moments of irregular time signatures, such as “The Distance” and bits of “A Casa,” for those seeking a hit of the band’s jazzier side. For me, math rock has always been a sort of paradox in terms of enjoyment: I’ve always appreciated and admired how artfully constructed the songs can be, but it usually feels like I’m one zoned-out second away from falling off the saddle. I can’t deny how impressive the guitar passages are, but damn, they can be hard to follow sometimes. Thankfully, Yüceil’s melodic voice brings you back into the reality of the track, which keeps it from getting completely lost.

What makes Blue Garden work for me as a cohesive record is how easily it transitions between the chaotic moments and its more intimate passages, and a lot of this is due to the cohesion of the interludes. I’m a sucker for a good interlude, especially if they serve an actual purpose instead of padding out the tracklist. “(light)” and “(night)” accomplish just that, as their specific placement on the record gives Blue Garden the shape of a three-act movie. Each of these interludes gives way to a broader song, with the specific transition from “(light)” to “Glow” feeling like a bridge between two sections of someone’s life. “Glow” highlights some comfortable, atmospheric textures that contrast with the more rambunctious first leg of the record. The track phases in and out of conversation between the instruments and the vocals, introducing a fuzzed-out guitar towards the middle that feels like it’s translating the words into an almost alien language. 

If you were looking for a song on this record to recommend to someone who wasn’t totally familiar with the specific genre nuances that Delta Sleep plays with, I would undoubtedly point you to the record’s second single, “Figure In The Dark.” This is one of the more straightforward cuts on the album, as it fits more closely into an emo, indie-rock sound if you had to give it a name, but the core of the track is much more upbeat than the lyrics would have you believe. On the flip side, there’s the mystical cut “Illuminator,” which is easily the most interesting song on the album to pick apart musically. There’s this backing synth about two-thirds of the way through the track that leads to the song's conclusion, bringing an ominous backdrop to an otherwise energetic guitar pattern and drawing more interest to what this newer element will build towards. What drove me crazy, on the other hand, was how there was so much going on within the first minute or so, and I just kept waiting for the payoff that never seemed to properly arrive. 

The final leg of Blue Garden finds its footing in its lyrics, starting with the cut “Sl_ck_rs,” which circles back to the harrowing ordeals that inspired the conception of this record. Yüceil wails a desperate warning of our planet’s destruction within the chorus:

And if we can’t fix the leak
Well then we might have made this our last century
And thrown away the chance to be
Better together

The penultimate track, “A Casa,” presents a form of introspection, shifting the focus inward with the themes of exploring your mentality within the destruction of the world around you. The band takes a triumphant step into the light in the final moments of the album with the song “Sunchaser.” Normally, I’m not the biggest fan of when bands drop the record’s closing song as a single, especially the first one, because it feels like you’re giving away the ending of a movie. However, this may be a rare exception, as the progression of the track and the lyrics become a sort of thesis for the entire project. The closer eases its way in with a math-rock-inspired riff before crashing down with drums and cathartic vocals about “Seeing you when the sun is shining.” There is so much darkness in the world, but living life without hope for the future or a shining sun to meet under only makes the world that much darker.

There’s a depth towards these moments that bring out an empathetic edge the album cleverly disguises as despair. Instead of purely relinquishing ourselves to an uncontrollable learned helplessness in every waking moment, Blue Garden invites listeners to feel everything through a diverse sonic landscape of math-rock, forays into emo territory, and splashes of indie. Part of being human is the ability to have these nuances throughout our synapses, and the four musicians of Delta Sleep know it all too well. There is a future out there, and as Delta Sleep puts it, “Maybe it’ll be worth finding.”

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Samuel Leon (they/he) is a Brooklyn-based music photographer, playwright, and performer. Sam writes plays about music but not musicals. Sam doesn’t like using the internet, but they will if they have to. If you are even remotely close to Brooklyn and want Sam to make you look cool on camera, hit them up on @sleonpics. They also have bad takes on Twitter @samislosingit.

Color Temperature – Here For It | Album Review

Developer Records

The human existence is an exercise in perspective. It’s an emotional state just as much as it is a physical one. As you get older, your perspective evolves, and your understanding of yourself and the world around you changes, reaching across temporal gaps to bring memories into fresh view, cast aglow in the light of experience and time. 

Color Temperature songs are preoccupied with perspective – especially the eleven tracks on the gorgeous new album Here For It. Ross Page, the one-man brainchild behind Color Temperature, is acutely adept at placing you, the listener, within his memories – seeing the same things,  experiencing the same emotions, feeling the same warmth of sunlight or coldness of shadow. Beyond the lyrics, the sound of the record is incredibly experiential. A Color Temperature song has the uncanny ability to flip your perspective on its head, re-orienting you into a new phase of understanding and spatial awareness. 

Take “Backdoor,” one of the excellent singles, for example. The song opens with an immediately endearing, bittersweet letter of regret: “I’m so sorry / I hurt you baby / I’d feed you cake I mean / If we had the money.” This is boosted by a rolling, fuzzy bass, the pleasant causticness of the tone ironically underscoring the intimacy. It’s the sound of laying on your bed in an apartment, working to get the words right. But then, the song takes off. The sonic world opens up. Now, it feels as if we’re on a train, watching the world go by. This spontaneous re-orientation makes us feel like we’re viewing the story from above, seeing the grander shapes and patterns of a life that led to this regret. Then, he brings us back to earth. The music shifts from soaring to ominous, sounding so obfuscated, as if we’re hearing the end of the song through several doors. Bringing us back into this apartment room. 

Time, revisitation, and shifting perspectives are all baked into the album’s core concept. To explain its structure, Page drew up a map of two concentric loops –  a circle within a circle. As a whole, the album can play as a perfect loop, much like Transatlanticism, a record whose long-trailed reverb legacy can be heard throughout Here For It. 

The song “Tracy,” which leads to the inner loop of songs, is a gorgeous jog through the late summer golden hour. Page’s softly sung, gain-cranked voice pulls you along with elastic elegance. The instrumentation here calls to mind the best of Sea and Cake – upbeat yet supremely soothing, with tropicália-esque elements intermingling with krautrock-adjacent rhythms. The guitars, recorded direct into computer rather than through amps (a byproduct of his move from Wilmington, NC to the more tightly packed Brooklyn), break up beautifully. Each note seems to barely hold itself together as it splits at the edges and cracks the veneer. But then, the energizing airiness is all sucked away, plunging us into a deep dive through aquatic synths and slowly drifting vocals. Page describes the song as being about reflecting on the past, the heartbreaks and the trials, and being hit with that doubt that asks, “Is that going to happen again?” It serves as the perfect emotional, thematic segue into the inner loop of regret and aged sadness. 

The inner loop, bookended by “Old City Pt. I” and “Old City Pt. II,” is a collection of older songs that either felt “too sad” for his previous record or that Page had reworked with a now-shifted perspective. Though, “Old City Pt. II” is one of the most comforting “too sad” songs I’ve heard in quite a while. The harmonized hope for light to “fill the frame again” is a mesmerizing, ghostly refrain that will loop in the mind of the bereaved long after the song fades to an end.  

When you exit the inner loop, you find yourself caught in the crystalline web of “Unveiling Decorations,” a show-stopping acoustic gem. The acoustic arrangement lets Page’s subtly masterful guitar layering shine, offering an uplifting respite before diving back into the glimmergaze of “Here For It.” The title track’s uneasy, shimmering guitars give way to rolling arpeggios, playing host to the best couplet of the album: “Shit, life’s just one big lingering ask / Shit, whatever you want, I’m here for it.” The gentle intimacy wraps you up in its sunny-with-shades-of-doom atmosphere. 

Then, it all (intentionally) falls apart at the end of “Dusk.” Everything dissolves into an ominous oscillation as if the whole song has been run through a haunted Leslie speaker. It’s the sound of arriving at the end of the cycle, leaving you ready for the loop to restart. It rings with the feeling of looking at a new phase in your life, noticing the echoes of what came before and how they change with this new perspective. Color Temperature encapsulates this delicate sensation in both the record as a whole and within its minutiae, creating a landscape that you’ll find yourself exploring more and more, discovering new beauty and strangeness within the ever-shifting perspectives. 

Joshua Sullivan is a writer, filmmaker, and musician based out of Wilmington, NC. Find him on Twitter (not X) at @brotherheavenz and Instagram at @human_giant.

Cursive – Devourer | Album Review

Run For Cover

A fucking brick tied to a hammer through the windshield at 100 miles per hour. This was the very first thing I felt hearing “Botch Job” for the first time, the blazing opener from the tenth Cursive album Devourer. It’s an apt title for the way the album kicks off, swallowing you whole in the midst of sharp, syncopated rhythms without stopping to chew or hydrate. The song is a full-force rocker that transitions into a lovely chorus section spotlighting Megan Siebe, the most badass cellist in alt-rock, churning with the rest of the band behind the dark and distinct frontman Tim Kasher. We’re only a few months shy of list season, so I feel confident calling “Botch Job” one of the year’s greatest opening tracks. The nearly three-decade surviving Nebraska band is no stranger to intensity, a facet that sold me on their music in the first place, although I’m still a bit of a stranger myself to most of their catalog.

Sometime in the early 2000s, my cousin showed me “Sierra,” the classic track from Cursive’s emo opus, The Ugly Organ. I held onto that anthem for a handful of years as my personal greatest hit of the band, a song so rad that I somehow refused any notion of listening to anything else they’d done, including the rest of The Ugly Organ. In 2009, I caught wind of their sixth album, Mama, I’m Swollen, and that album’s opening track, “In The Now,” became the second Cursive song I fell in love with. Things stayed that way for a full decade: just me, two Cursive songs, and an inexplicable lack of desire to further investigate a band who, by my account, had at least two incredible songs.

It was my girlfriend who made the final sale for me in 2019 when she took me to their co-headlining tour with mewithoutYou, supported by The Appleseed Cast. I was prepared for that show by being 1) a longtime Appleseed fan who had never seen them in concert, 2) a less than lukewarm mewithoutYou fan who became vehemently against everything that band was about after seeing them play a dreadfully boring set, and 3) a curious Cursive fan who loved exactly two songs. They must have known I was coming, like they had a secret band meeting backstage and went, “Oh shit, that kid that only knows and likes two of our songs is coming; let’s convince him we have more than two good songs” (a brief aside: I went through this exact same scenario with Dashboard Confessional as well a couple years prior). They opened with “Sierra” and did not play “In The Now,” but then played a lot of other songs that I came to enjoy very much, and I asked their merch seller for a recommendation on which vinyl I should buy since I was now a Cursive convert. He recommended the third album, 2000’s Cursive's Domestica.

I brought that record home, played it, and thought, “This rocks but sounds nothing like the live show or those two songs I’ve loved forever.” So I began to educate myself on the ever-stylistically-mutating band known as Cursive, whose first three albums exist in the classic emo canon alongside legendary bands like Elliott, Mineral, and Texas Is The Reason, before transitioning into sort of a goth-rock Yellowcard or a steam-punk Modest Mouse on The Ugly Organ. I would go on to sell that copy of Domestica, then after the pandemic, see them perform all of Domestica in concert, buy the 20th-anniversary reissue version at that concert, and then sell that copy of Domestica. This is no shade to Domestica; it’s more reflective of the fact that I buy too many records.

So this is the state I enter Devourer in, where I’ve heard at least some songs from most of their albums, have a general idea of how to describe their post-hardcore-meets-art-rock sound, and have enjoyed enough of that idea to be interested in this new album. To my surprise, the first half of the album felt like my musical picture of the band had been punched through like a $10 Million Monet. As a non-expert, it feels like something totally off the wall for Cursive, yet in their wheelhouse of pushing their own sonic boundaries. Throughout the Devourer tracklist, I hear notes of artists like At The Drive-In and Biffy Clyro, much more than I hear more traditional emo or alternative influences. The band hits a run of tracks on the first side that fall into a very particular space that I think few bands are able to get into: structured, emotional music that relies more on riffs and energy than it does twinkly guitars or moaned vocals. Cursive’s new labelmates Citizen nailed this on 2017’s fantastic As You Please, or the more space rock-leaning Thrice material showcased on their latest album Horizons / East in 2021. Cursive’s aforementioned killer opener is followed by “Up and Away,” a bit of a contrast to the ferocity of “Botch Job,” built around a more melodic verse and chorus but keeping up a noisy, off-kilter riff in between.

Cursive released four advance singles to the album, which I personally think is far too much. Spoiling 25% of an upcoming release, especially when three of those singles make up the first four songs in the tracklist, seemed like a bit of an odd choice to me. Between those songs, “Imposturing” is certainly single-worthy, landing firmly in Cursive’s classic wheelhouse of frenetic yet catchy art rock. Kasher’s delivery on the lyric “If it works to be hurt you could be a piece of shit / Leave your house and your spouse like a great escape artist” is expertly calculated and performed, with a large crop of other spitfire quotables throughout:

Ain’t that the reason you write your hangdog and forthright songs?
You make ‘em up as you go along

An even odder choice to me was the band skipping the opportunity entirely on priming “The Avalanche Of Our Demise” as one of those initial singles. Personally, I think if you’ve ever been a fan of the band in any era, this seems like it could be regarded among their greatest and long-lasting cuts. It has everything you want out of a Cursive track: the angular, anchoring guitar riff, Kasher’s signature storytelling, and a creative chorus presented with the guitars, drums, and cello working in unison to accent the tale. Kasher hits another knockout vocal performance on this song with “What’s going to stop it anyway? Rogue waves and hurricanes / Isn’t that what a checkbook’s for? Disaster relief du jour.” Any moment of Devourer’s first quarter is enough to keep you locked in for the album’s remainder, although it’s my feeling that Cursive did frontload quite a bit this time around.

Things slow down on “Rookie,” which frankly is a nice moment after the no-punches-pulled run at the top of the album, and then a bit of a surprisingly upbeat number, “Dead End Days,” follows. It almost feels like a +44 track to me with the prominent keyboards and driving rhythm, which doesn’t feel outside of Cursive’s abilities at all. Kasher gets in another cutting lyric with “Life is like a bowl of grapes, stomped on until bitter wine is made.” He has always been extremely good at making lyrics stand out, and the writing on Devourer is no different.

Those synth flairs show up again on “Dark Star,” a danceable darkwave cut reminiscent of Matt Skiba’s post-punk passion project Heavens, a band I think of on “Consumers” as well with the distorted background vocals boosting Kasher’s leads. It’s in Devourer’s back half where things seem to pale compared to its strong beginning, but isolating those tracks, including the classic-Cursive-sounding “What Do We Do Now,” prove that the record isn’t as top-heavy as it feels. It just happens to have an extremely strong opening sequence that’s ripe for repetition.

“The Loss” is a quiet closer; not bad, but nothing on the level that the rest of the album is operating. Thematically, I understand its place, but the intensity of “The Age of Impotence” would have made a nice compliment to “Botch Job” if it ended the record instead. Even if Kasher’s screaming of “motherfucker!” in the refrain comes off a bit cheesy, but at least it’s much more succinct than “What the Fuck” which closes out the album’s first half on a very weak note.

Despite their stylistic evolution, Cursive feels like a very consistent group even this long into their career. These new songs from Devourer were very well received at the band’s recent Riot Fest performance, shuffled in with other catalog classics. Whether it’s Central American emo or apocalyptic art punk, Cursive can take on any sound without jeopardizing the message at the core of the band, and Devourer is the next great installment.

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Logan Archer Mounts once almost got kicked out of Warped Tour for doing the Disturbed scream during a band’s acoustic set. He currently lives in Rolling Meadows, IL, but tells everyone he lives in Palatine.

Origami Angel – Feeling Not Found | Album Review

Counter Intuitive Records

In case you haven't heard, it's pretty much impossible to remove the looming shadow of the Internet from the current state of music... Well, the current state of everything really, but this is an album review, so, music. In fact, the tangibility of the Internet has never felt more salient: public streaming numbers are turning music listening into a prizeless competition, artists with one viral song are getting Grammy nominations, and meme culture dyed the Internet lime green for a summer. It’s all making the way people interact with life and art weird. 

Sure, the web is a tool to connect music to listeners and audiences to artists, but the relationship between music and the ‘Net is complex. It’s a place for buzzing discussion just as much as it is endless discourse. It’s a way to DM secret show addresses and document music scenes, but also a place where artists have to scrape by in an uneasy relationship with companies who have monopolized the technical side of things without considering the music side of things. Much like existing, The Online can be emotional and overwhelming and loud and cruel and intoxicating and real. Over the last few decades, we've watched it build and build until one day, it feels like everything will finally just be blue screens. Shrouded in this blue glow is where we find Origami Angel’s latest album, Feeling Not Found.

On their third album, buried between the 0s and 1s, Ryland Heagy and Pat Doherty dive deeper into familiar (certifiably Gami) territory while simultaneously breaking into exciting new realms. Through their discography, the band has always been driven by a handful of specific themes and tricks, and Feeling Not Found is no exception – but this is their brashest and boldest project yet. After years of experiments within the emo sound, their third full-length catapults Origami Angel into another echelon of expertise as they experiment with even more genres, deliveries, and emotion. They're combatting information overload with information overload. 

In Feeling Not Found, there’s always another layer, another lyrical twist, another reference, or another unpredictable change around the corner as Origami Angel contends with the tensions of tangible reality through digital metaphor. With earlier song titles like “ROM Hack,” the story of how Origami Angel broke Minecraft and their rise to Emo Fame via online DIY circles, it’s impossible to separate Origami Angel from their existence within the Internet—and no one is more aware of this than the band themselves. 

This concept-album-type-thing is not new to Origami Angel. Their first album, Somewhere City, imagined an escapist town filled with backyard roller coasters and endless refills of Dr. Pepper. To give you an idea of how much this band commits to the bit, physical copies of their debut came with a map of the city, and the album rolled out through a now-defunct augmented reality game. They continued the conceptual thread when they recorded their sophomore double album, GAMI GANG, in Heagy’s bedroom during lockdown. While that feels like a lifetime ago, Origami Angel hasn't stopped releasing music since. On a random Friday in 2022, the duo suddenly dropped re: turn, a gentle acoustic EP, and on the following Monday, they uploaded DEPART, a twin, body-slamming hardcore EP. On the back half of their latest, The Brightest Days, they dealt with the excruciating inner turmoil they feel towards the treatment of their hometown through the sunny confines of a breezy, Weezer-influenced mixtape. All of this makes the new album’s digital framing a natural and even necessary perspective for this particular project. It also gave the band an excuse to send Nintendo DS cartridges of the album to fans, which I bet they have wanted to do for a very long time.

Feeling Not Found is a pointed conglomeration of all the sounds and themes they experimented with over the past few years as they ascended to emo stardom. Release after release, album after EP after mixtape, Origami Angel have always stuck to a pronged emotional core with general ideas like longing, grappling with betrayal, pinpointing the authentic self amongst the weird, and breaking the fourth wall to talk directly to their audience. This consistency is one of the band’s most underhanded strengths, a common center that the duo can always ascend from, revisit, adjust, and reaffirm. Feeling Not Found comfortably continues these established concepts while newly remembering that the opposite of 'want' is 'take.'

The album begins with its thesis, “Lost Signal,” a soft synth track laced with grief. Heagy’s vocals digitize slowly as if suddenly engulfed by the computer screen he imagines. He ends the song solemnly with the suggestion that “maybe there’s a way out that nobody sees, In the static displays of our old CRTs, The sounds of the universe being created, And most people hate it.” This song sets the tone of Feeling Not Found and opens the window into the digital landscape: the hope for hope amongst numbness.

The album starts to quite literally rip from there, zipping through the circuits and directly into the electrifying introduction of “Dirty Mirror Selfie.” If “Lost Signal” sets the tone, “Dirty Mirror Selfie” sets the pace. In three minutes and thirty-seven seconds, the song touches on hair metal, power pop, emo, pop-punk, nu-metal, and something that reminds me of the build in a 00s singer-songwriter’s ballad before it's all blended into a hardcore breakdown that reminds you that their home, Washington D.C., invented this stuff. While this album fairly solidly pushes Origami Angel out of any stagnant “emo” descriptor and beyond the 5th wave ingénuity they contributed to, it’s not not-emo. For example, as the tracklist plays on, “Viral” trades in the melancholy realizations of “Where Blue Light Blooms” for dejected vulnerability, with lyrics pivoting briefly back to the more somber days of Quiet Hours amongst the squeal of a guitar and click of drumsticks. 

After “Underneath My Skin” softly shuts the door on its way out, “Wretched Trajectory” kicks it back open. Between descriptions of a building sense of panic and a private need to see someone again, this song slides closest back to the Somewhere City and Gami Gang of it all. Specifically, it could even be a callback to similar emotions expressed in “The Title Track” or later in “Self Destruct.” But that’s not all, because it's also just as loud as those predecessors. 

Pat Doherty’s drumming style is one of incomparable precision and intensity that glows throughout the entire album (and the band’s entire discography, for that matter). “Wretched Trajectory” is primarily driven through Doherty’s heartbeat of a kickdrum, a moment showcased best in the bridge as the rest of the music drops out and he powers all momentum. It’s impossible not to think of how these songs will translate into Origami Angel’s riotous live shows, where the circle pit never stops circling, and the crowd surfers never stop surfing. 

The final gang vocals of “Wretched Trajectory” arc down into the anguished ballad “AP Revisionist History” before leading into “Living Proof,” which begins with a beachy pop-punk beat that bounces along, grating against the simmering ferocity of the lyrics. As Heagy singsongs a reminder that “I don’t think that that’s how you’re supposed to talk to people you say you love,” the song slowly grows more sinister. Formerly boppy guitar riffs start to slice between Heagy’s words, matching their acerbic strikes. Suddenly, without warning, the floor falls out from underneath the song, revealing a pulsing beatdown. After years of releases, it’s become abundantly clear that Heagy is not afraid to get mad as fuck — in fact, he screamed across an EP about it in 2022. For the DEPART-heads out there, “Living Proof” picks up where “JUDGE” left off, and it’s even meaner. 

So, how have these past few years of emo celebrity and indie darling-dom treated Origami Angel? Thanks for asking. Past lead single “Fruit Wine” sits “Sixth Cents (Get It?),” one of the record's final singles. This song digs very openly at the uglier parts of being a working musician: the pay, the falsified enthusiasm, and the empty promises. A restless rhythm complements the song’s sardonic condemnation of The Music Industry, as the band seems to mimic the demands they’re receiving – specifically, the notion that artists have to constantly change themselves to be noticed by any kind of algorithm-based popularity machine. It’s funny, it’s rude, it races at a 2:15 pm-Warped-tour-mainstage-metalcore speed, and it resonates.

This song is immediately followed by the breathless “secondgradefoofight” and the two share an incredibly fun music video. Origami Angel has always worn their references on their sleeves, from proudly championing sidelined bands like Chunk! No, Captain Chunk! to instantly name-dropping DC’s The Obsessives when asked about their duo structure. As a band that does the most (haha) at every juncture possible, their references are endless – they're very clearly geeks with a deep appreciation for lots of music, and that makes it pretty easy to be a fan of theirs. However, the joint music video is the most they’ve ever referenced other artists as they step into their shoes and recreate the videos that made these stars famous, from Taking Back Sunday’s VH1 Top 20 Video Countdown-ready “Cute Without the 'E' (Cut From the Team)” to Phoebe Bridgers’ highly-parodied “Kyoto” to that one frame of Modern Baseball’s “Your Graduation” that probably has a fan base of its own. But despite the perhaps therapeutic airing of grievances in “Sixth Cents (Get It?)” and the threats of the anxiety-riddled “secondgradefoofight,” there is still an emotional toll to it all. The stretch of anti-industry, semi-self-motivating tracks ends on “HM07 Waterfall,” a Pokémon-referencing song that cracks the screen Gami carefully placed between the digital and the real as it starts to apologize for the personal impact of these conflicts.

In Ian Cohen’s Pitchfork review of the comparatively hopeful Somewhere City, he concludes with the suggestion that “Origami Angel would be wise to explore the darkness on the edge of town.” It seems that in the tumultuous five years since that release, the band has found themselves in that exact fading light. On that album, Origami Angel ended with a repeated refrain, “The city never lets me down,” a sweet conclusion to a very sweet project. A couple of years later, the band ended their second album with the repeated confirmation, “This is goodbye.” Now, on the title track for Feeling Not Found, the band marries the two sentiments into the bittersweet affirmation, “No matter how much the world wants me to change.” It’s a conclusion that they could have only gotten to now. Suddenly, the anxiety of the blue light fades away.

After all of this, can you even look at the world around you without seeing the junk and firewalls? The digitalscape is woven into the reality of Origami Angel, not only in the music listening but in their lyrics, musical references, song titles, and conceptual outlook. In their own words, “When the cycle is over, and all the circuits are broken, you won’t be fighting resistance in spite of existence.” So log off, close this review, listen to the album, and remove yourself from the Internet. Just know that when you look away, there will be a split second where the brightness of this exact screen will still be burned over your vision, momentarily blending your digital life into your physical reality.

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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.