The Relatable Suffering Of Greet Death

When most people think of Flint, Michigan, one thing typically pops to mind: the Flint Water Crisis. They know it’s a depressed town in the midwest that has uncovered larger systemic issues. A city that has been failed by its own government, whose people have been left for dead because of extreme income inequality and poverty. I’ve been to Flint once, maybe twice, and I can confirm that there’s a reason it’s become symbolic for all those things. It’s no fault of Flint; they are a symptom of capitalism. A casualty of corporate greed sucking the life out of the towns that once aided to capitalistic gain, now drained and discarded.

Greet Death is a shoegaze band from Flint, Michigan, and they embody this same type of deep-seated betrayal, bitterness, and sorrow in their music. But like any other citizen of Flint, Greet Death aren’t content to just give up and lie down; they are going to continue, they are going to create, and they are going to persevere. Not only that, they are going to thrive and live to tell the story. 

The type of profound misery found in Greet Death’s discography isn’t unique. There are songs of heartbreak and hard decisions found in everything from emo to Americana. What makes Greet Death different is how they translate that sense of lumbering existential dread into their instrumentals. The type of heaviness that the band experiences in life is carried over into their production, their lyrics, and their song structures. This isn’t some over-the-top stoner rock heaviness where the bass is fuzzed-out because it sounds good to a college freshman doing bong rips; in Greet Death’s case, heaviness is the only way to do these stories justice. 

The group combines this distorted, shoegazey instrumental bed with the unique vocal stylings of bassist Sam Boyhtari and guitarist Logan Gaval. Helmed primarily by Boyhtari, his soft, higher-pitched croon provide a nice counterpoint to the heaviness of the band’s instrumentals. It humanizes the tracks in a way that makes the dense fog feel slightly more bearable. Meanwhile, Gaval lends a bit of a clearer more ‘poppy’ sensibility to the band… poppy only in the sense that, when compared to everything else, the songs that Gaval sings are downright catchy by comparison.

Take all of these elements and place them over the sway of Jim Versluis’ consistently impressive drumming, and you have Greet Death. Together the band has released two albums, a 7", and an Audiotree live, all amounting to exactly two hours of dense, smoky, riff-filled music that captures a sense of dread unlike anything I’ve ever heard. 

I use the word ‘dread,’ but even now, after multiple re-reads and edit passes, don’t think I can find anything better. Greet Death’s music is at once sinister and foreboding yet comforting and ritualistic. There’s a sense of something cataclysmically evil lurking just on the edge of your peripheral vision, yet your eyes can only fixate on what’s right in front of you. The songs are dark, moody, and crushing, but they also possess this sort of magic that keeps you coming back. They aren’t catchy in a singalong way, but they embed themselves somewhere deep within your psyche and keep you coming back for more. 

Anyone familiar with the shoegaze and dream-pop genres will likely know exactly what I’m talking about. The same way that Slowdive is peaceful yet existential. The same way that Hum is warm yet morbid. The same way that Mazzy Star is relaxing yet sorrowful. It’s that mix of contradicting feelings that both captivate and confuse. 

Greet Death is part of a new class of shoegaze acts integrating unique stylistic elements in order to flesh out corners of the genre that were previously unexplored. Bands like Holy Fawn, Gleemer, Narrow Head, and Clearbody, all of whom are taking cues from different genres and melding them into the shoegaze sound to increasingly-impressive effect. Greet Death is taking more inspiration from stoner rock and post-rock, two genres very near and dear to my heart, so it would follow that the music from the Flint natives clicks with my brain particularly well. 

When I first heard Dixieland, the band’s debut, I’ll admit I wasn’t all that impressed. I knew the band was part of the Michigan DIY scene, one heavily populated with dime-a-dozen emo bands, so honestly, I was probably just surprised to not hear guitar tapping within the first few seconds. My turning point on the band came in 2019 when they released New Hell and it made its way onto my album of the year list within the space of about one month. 

Throughout 2020 New Hell has been an album I’ve returned to on an almost weekly, sometimes daily basis. It has become a comfort album, one that I can rely on and call upon at any time. I can come into New Hell in any emotional or mental state and emerge on the other side completely changed. 

What first drew me to New Hell were the other, more familiar sounds that I heard in the band. There was a folksy Alex G-like twang on “Let It Die,” there was stoner rock riffage on tracks like “Strain,” and these elements proved familiar enough for me to give the band a second chance. From there, I began to fall in love with characteristics unique to the record, the molten guitar solo on “You’re Gonna Hate What You’ve Done,” the deliciously fuzzed-out tone on “Strange Days,” and the hypnotic lyricism on “Entertainment.” The band caps it all off with an epic ten-minute closing track that explains the album’s namesake and wades the listener off with an instrumental bed that twists and winds to its inevitable conclusion. In the final minutes of the album, the band pairs Boyhtari’s singing with Gaval’s screams, mirroring each other over a towering riff that’s nothing short of soul-destroying. It’s one of the best closing tracks I’ve ever heard and wraps the album up in such a compelling, emotional way that’s both thought-provoking and motivating. 

I soon realized the album’s power. Every time I hit play on the record, I began to recognize the almost-tangible effects it had on my surroundings. No matter what environment I listened to the album in, New Hell was a record that poured out of the speakers and eventually grew to permeate every corner of whatever room I found myself in. The songs creaked, rumbled, and reverberated, bouncing around the walls of my brain and leaving me emotionally-drained in their wake. Now, this might not sound fun, but this is exactly what I want from my music sometimes. 

After dozens of relistens to New Hell, I ventured back into Dixieland and discovered that, unexpectedly, the band’s debut carries the same heft as their sophomore effort. There’s a different wrapper on them, but the nine songs on Dixieland hit the exact same fold of my brain as the nine found on New Hell. Songs like “Bow” use the same lyrical device as “Entertainment,” repeating one phrase over and over again until it morphs from poetic to hypnotic. Meanwhile, “Black Hole Jesus Christ” is probably the most dynamic track on the album, gradually shifting from reverb-laden soundscapes and ballad-like deliveries to an ascending post-rock instrumental that beckons you to join it over at the edge of the universe. Best of all, both “The Waste” and “Cumbersome” are hulking, monstrous seven-minute tracks that act as tentpoles for their respective sides of the album. These songs gradually carve their riffs into your head and leave you to wade through the emotional wreckage once they’re over. 

After multiple listens of Dixieland, I found myself reevaluating the two records as part of a larger oeuvre. I began to believe that they are actually connected in some way. Obviously, they’ve come from the same minds, but perhaps there’s a deeper connective tissue between these two records than I previously realized. 

After my many, many, many relistens to New Hell, I've crafted a defined opinion on the album, more explicitly on its thesis. Greet Death don’t strike me as the type to over-explain their songs. In their Audiotree session, Gaval explains the surprisingly nonchalant origin of the album’s title, specifically, a shitty retail job where things were always going wrong, which led his co-worker to joke that ‘every day is a new hell.’ While that anecdote explains the origins of the album’s namesake, it’s a far cry from explaining what the term means to the band or even within the context of the record’s nine songs. This is all a long-winded way of me saying that everything from here on out is solely my interpretation of Greet Death’s music and what the band is trying to say.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder - Netherlandish Proverbs (1559)

The cover of New Hell reminds me of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s work, specifically Netherlandish Proverbs and The Triumph of Death. I know between me using the word ‘oeuvre’ and name-dropping 16th-century renaissance painters, your Pretentious Douchebag Alarm is probably going off loud as hell, but I promise all of this will make sense soon. 

These paintings (as recently popularized by the Fleet Foxes and It Came At Night, respectively) are mid-sized hyper-detailed oil paintings that depict, in a word, chaos. Netherlandish Proverbs is meant to offer literal illustrations of Dutch-language proverbs and idioms; these include people on fire, someone slaughtering a sheep, and (what appears to be) a twisted form of inter-species fellatio à la that one shot from The Shining. Meanwhile, The Triumph of Death is a more brutal and straightforward painting meant to literally depict hell on earth. In this painting, the skies are filled with smoke and adopt an orange hue. Armies of undead skeletons are funneling the last few surviving humans into some sort of torture chamber while others mutilate, brutalize, and otherwise torment the corpses of the recently deceased. These paintings are both brutal in different ways. For example, one is a quaint rustic town scene that becomes more twisted and disturbing the longer you look at it. The other is just outright violent and spiritually unquieting.  

Pieter Bruegel the Elder - The Triumph of Death (1562)

To me, the cover to New Hell created by Liam Rush achieves the same effect. It’s a twisted, violent, disorienting mix of human bodies and demon forms. The humans are either curled up helpless or screaming in agony as sadistic demons rip hearts from chests and cleave bodies in half. There are skeletons, serpents, fire, and fangs. It’s a detailed, ornate, gold-tinted depiction of literal hell, much like The Triumph of Death. Still, there are telltale signs of the earth we know scattered throughout the carnage; a cop car on fire, a radio tower, a factory topped with smokestacks. These are all references to lyrics within the album but also serve as remnants of the world we know hidden beneath the more immediate layer of damnation.  

While there is some degree of interpretive flexibility within the record, for the most part, it feels like the band is taking this name and applying it more loosely. The “New Hell” they talk about in the album is different for every listener. Sometimes it’s an emotional hell, sometimes it’s a physical hell, sometimes it’s literally just the biblical hell. At least that’s what I get from it, and that’s what makes New Hell an excellent record: these songs and their meanings, are different for everyone who listens to them. 

By contrast, Dixieland takes many of these stylistic cues mentioned above but applies them to a more grounded environment. The songs are still lofty, lumbering, and even metaphorical at times, but they are firmly rooted in the band’s lived experience growing up in Flint. According to the Pitchfork review, Dixieland gets its name from a flea market in the band’s hometown. This is foundational in the album’s creation and the band’s observations of their surroundings, but it also acts as a stand-in for any number of abandoned midwest towns that have been left to rot by our government and society. 

Dixieland is depicting a different type of hell, one that the band was born into, has lived through, and continues to exist in. It's a hyper-specific and grounded depiction of their environment; the music is merely the result of that environment, the band's best attempt at formulating the feelings of their world into a song.  

That is why Greet Death appeals to me on such a deep level. Not only does the band borrow the sludgy tones and grandiose song structures of genres that I already love, but they depict a feeling and an emotion that I’ve only experienced while living in Detroit. They capture this sense of hopelessness, of abject sadness, of the oppressive indifference of reality, and they do it better than anyone I’ve ever heard.

In other words, New Hell is a metaphorical version of hell that can be interpreted as literal, while Dixieland depicts a literal type of misery and torment that feels biblical. They’re two sides to the same coin, both using varying degrees of interpretation and metaphor to pack their message in. Both albums use the same type of slow, brutal instrumentation to batter the listener with riff after riff, forcing them into understanding this type of sadness, first through sympathy on Dixieland, then later by empathy on New Hell. They are two records that work together towards a collective understanding of humanity, suffering, and divinity. The band is able to juxtapose these external elements of everyday sadness with a deeply-understood internal sorrow, and I feel like I have a better understanding of the world as a result. 

PHOTO: Kris Herrmann

FinalBossFight! Walks Us Through Every Song on Their Debut EP 'The Light In Your Room'

Most people don’t get into music for money. Most people don’t get into music for clout. Most people start making music because they are creative and have something inside themselves that they need to get out into the world. The DIY scene is a perfect encapsulation of this ethos. Nobody in this is making money. Even bands on some of the biggest “labels” in DIY are just run by a few people who are merely helping artists with logistical concerns, supply chains, and album promotion. 

Even for “successful” musicians, making a living off of music is hard. Plus, with touring being a non-factor this year, making any money off music in 2020 is almost impossible. Nobody is looking at the music scene as it stands today and thinking, ‘I could make some serious cash in this system.’ People in DIY especially know they’re not going to make a living with this, so why bother? Especially now?

Because the spirit of DIY is indomitable. 

There will always be people experiencing the world, formulating thoughts on it, and wanting to translate those experiences into something bigger than themselves. Music is something that can exist outside of yourself, a permanent document of not only a time in your life, but a time in the world. Just look around; bands are still releasing music, filming videos, and selling shirts because they believe in their message. Even if people aren’t flocking to your songs by the thousands, sometimes it’s just rewarding to find a few other people out there who believe in it and identify with those same emotions. That connection is what music is all about. That’s the reward. 

While FinalBossFight! may sound like a one-word, exclamation-pointed Myspace-era screamo band in the vein of Lions!Tigers!Bears! or Eatmewhileimhot!, they’re very much a product of 2020. Formed in March of this year, the same time as our nationwide shutdown, FinalBossFight! is a band that has existed only in the time of quarantine. They’ve written, recorded, and now released a collection of songs under the imposing shadow of a global pandemic, and that alone is an artistic achievement. 

Seeing the fruits of the band’s labor in the form of lead singles “Spitney Beers” and “Ivory” this summer only solidified my beliefs in the group’s steadfast determination. When a project is born and bred in what feels like the end of the world, that means there’s a baseline level of ‘fuck you, we’re going for it,’ which also tracks with the band’s midwest upbringing. 

The Light In Your Room represents the artistic payoff to months of scrappy recordings, DIY promotion, and intermittent band practice. Created equal parts by guitarist John Coote and drummer Sage Denam, the two share vocal and writing duties, the end result being a hearty emo EP that feels equal parts communal and personal. There are tappy guitar lines, goofy song titles, and all the usual emo elements, but the release speaks for itself as a testament to steadfast creativity and musical drive. It’s a document of the good that can happen even when nearly every aspect of the world outside seems to be conspiring against you. Pandemic be damned, FinalBossFight! is here, and they’re ready to shred.

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Spitney Beers

This was the first song I actually wrote for FinalBossFight!. When John and I first started working on music at the beginning of the year, I had a few ideas from the last couple of years that weren’t completed, just a collection of choruses and riffs. I really wanted to start a new song from scratch, and I knew that after talking about our influences, I wanted to write a fast, hard-hitting song that I would like to hear from those bands. I took a little bit of inspiration from the fast-paced pop-punk/emo music I was listening to at the time and sat down in my bedroom and started writing and it. Surprisingly, it did not take long to come up with the song’s structure, and the rest just sort of fell into place.

For the most part, the lyrics focus on the troubles someone is going through in a relationship that lacks trust and honesty but is filled with copious amounts of alcohol. At the time of writing, I had just recently gone through some troubles in my life that were mainly caused by me living too recklessly and drinking way too much. I felt the need to write about that issue in a way that reflected on how substance abuse and trust issues could mess up things like the relationships in my life.

I recorded a video of me playing it acoustically in my room and singing what I had for it, then sent it to John, and he loved what he heard. From there, we just kept messing around with it any time we got the chance to hang out. He ended up adding some additional guitar parts that I absolutely loved, and that helped the song turn into what I had in my head but couldn’t quite get to out without his help.
- Sage

Texas Sized Ten Four

This track was an idea that I had back in December before FinalBossFight! was ever formed. I was messing around with some chords and riffs in Drop D tuning and eventually turned it into a full song before adding the drums. Once Sage and I started practicing together, I remembered this song, and I showed him. We worked on it for a bit together while I figured out the lyrics and everything soon came together.

When I wrote this song, I was in an off-and-on relationship that lacked communication and that’s what I based the lyrics around. A lot of it is about wondering what the other person is up to and the misconceptions you have about someone when you are unsure what they are doing. When you are so open with someone about what you are doing and how everything is going with you, and they don’t do the same in return, it can lead to a lot of issues.

This song has more of a “pop” feel than the rest of the EP, which we believed made it stand out. We really wanted this song to be on the EP, and especially where it is on the tracklist, because it sounds so different than the rest of the project; it really shows that we can have a diverse range of sounds and still make it work.
- John

Ivory

This is probably the quickest song I wrote for the project. It all came to me late one summer night. The whole thing, from the idea for the melody to the final of the lyrics, probably only took 2 or 3 hours, but it all worked out how I wanted it to. Once I showed Sage, he was immediately on board with putting the song on the EP.

The lyrics have a lot to do with the anger you feel while going through the stages of grief. After repeatedly trying to save a relationship that was ultimately doomed from the start, you reach a breaking point where you realize there’s nothing left to save, and it’s better that everything just ends. Of course, that will make you bitter, which explains a lot of the song's lyrical content. This person has put you through a lot, and you’re finally accepting that you’re done trying to forgive them. You’re done being their emotional punching bag: “That’s it. Sayonara! Take it out on someone else because I’m gone.”

The song was pretty much finished by the time I brought it to the table to be put on the EP. Sage added a few touches here and there, and we both loved the song enough for us to put it out as our second single before we ever even had the EP fully together.
- John

Eviction Notice

This was a song I actually started working on years before Finalbossfight! was ever even an idea. Every time I went back to work on it, I couldn’t get anything done besides the chorus melody and the first line of the verse. A big part of me not ever finishing this song was never seeing an opportunity to have a band that I could fully record it with. Once we started getting tracks together for the EP, I found the old notes on my phone, and I knew I finally had to finish it.

For the most part, the song deals with throwing out everything, both physically and mentally, after someone leaves your life as a way of getting rid of them; “evicting” them from your head. I think most people have memories they wish they could just throw away, so as John and I were writing this song, it was so easy for us to relate to what we were vocalizing. It’s a pretty simple song, but it has this pounding energy that just makes you want to throw shit in the trash and yell at your brain for keeping all the memories that you know don’t mean anything to you anymore.

Also, there’s a little reference to two American Football songs in the first verse, and I personally think that made for one of the most clever lines on the whole EP.
- Sage

Winter Coat // Shorts

This song is my personal favorite on the EP, and that seems to be a common sentiment for most people who have listened to The Light In Your Room in full. Just like “Eviction Notice,” this was a song I started writing years ago but could never make it past the first verse until John and I formed the band and actually started working on songs together. There’s a part in the middle of this song where we use a blast of chaotic noise to kind of separate “Winter Coat” from “Shorts.” There was a time where we considered having these as two separate tracks, but after we messed around with that transition between the two parts, we knew it had to all be one.

The first part of the track, “Winter Coat,” focuses on the distance someone has with somebody else, both physically and emotionally. This person is full of excuses as to why they can’t change; their car not starting, phone being dead, or the fact that they’re just a burnout. The transition in the middle of the song is meant as a stand-in for the passage of time. After this flash-forward, the two are now living in the same area, but things are different. The “burnout” from the beginning of the song now faces this internal conflict where they’re not sure if they want to leave and get lost or if they want to simply go for a drive and come back and have everything be normal. Kind of a “Should I Stay Or Should I Go” situation.

We decided to have this as the last song on the tracklist because it perfectly wraps up the EP. There’s so much energy at the end of this song, and that’s the exact kind of final push I love to hear at the end of a project. I can’t wait until one day (when we aren’t facing such an awful pandemic) where I see a crowd of people lose their minds to the end of this song with us.
- Sage

Moon By Moon - Chelsea | EP Review

In my experience, life isn’t the hardest at extremes. Obviously, when things are going good, then the hardships that life throws your way are just seen as balance. Even when tainted by the glow of nostalgia, those good periods in your life can fuel you for years after the fact. In other words, the negative things all wash away with the distance of time. Meanwhile, the overtly bad periods can be crushing, but there’s a consistency to them that allows you to put your head down, get things done, and try your best to change your situation… because that’s all you have. 

No, I’ve found that the hardest parts of life are those liminal spaces that exist between these two polarities. The middle ground that lives between the highs and the lows. The mundane days, the absence of life, the haunting abyss of nothingness. The space when you’re in between jobs and have an interview or two lined up; you’re not hopeless, but you’re not sure how much hope you can allow yourself. That point in a fight where you’re not sure if your partner is about to end it all or keep on loving you. The times when you just have no fucking clue what you’re doing. The space between the good and the bad is what pains me most because it’s not numbed by an extreme. You’re in limbo, and that is its own kind of pain.

Chelsea, the newest EP from Moon By Moon, is a release dedicated to examining these in-between spaces in life. It’s a nine-minute collection of auditory exploration that wanders through these moments with both tenacity and grace, a feat if I’ve ever seen one. 

“Chelsea,” the EP’s namesake, opens with a swirling ethereal coda that flashes forward in time to the song’s eventual melody, tipping its hand before the listener even knows it. Disembodied voices float through the air over a dreamy Mazzy Star-like instrumental, eventually dissolving into a tapped guitar line and swaying vocal melody. Halfway into the track, the song mounts and the drums erupt, making way for a towering indie rock riff that sounds straight out of a Snail Mail song. As shoegaze-like distortion erupts the song’s melody, the singing becomes more impassioned and soon the entire thing simmers over, pausing just long enough for the initial guitar line to make one final appearance before ascending into the clouds. 

From there, the two songs that make up the back half of the EP work together as a singular ambient piece that takes the project from reality to a sort of Twin Peaks-like dream state. “Stars” opens with the pitter-patter of rain which slowly fades in favor of a simple acoustic guitar pattern and gorgeously hushed vocals. This passage evokes the optimistic beauty of Adrianne Lenker’s recent solo work while simultaneously capturing some of the stark, existential sounds of artists like Grouper. 

Finally, “Something in the Making” sends the listener off on another bed of swirling angelic voices that mirror the EP’s opening. It’s a beguiling and dream-like way to end the release that makes the whole thing circle back to the beginning. In this way, the final two minutes of this EP act as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy that ends up forming one larger recursive journey.

Chelsea is an EP that exists in life’s liminal moments. Not only that, Chelsea finds the beauty in those liminal moments and holds them under a magnifying glass for the entire world to see. It’s a collection of sounds that, optimistically, chooses to hone in on the good in those moments when other people might waver. 

This is a release that captures the best of those in-between moments. The space between wake and sleep, between the wind and the trees, between the past and the future. It is the shaking of leaves in the fall. It is the insects trilling far off in the summer air. It’s an ode to a lost year, capturing the bleary days and restless nights that we’ve collectively weathered while suspended in stasis. The fact that the band chose to focus on the positive moments within those spaces shows their strength not only as artists but as people.

The Sonder Bombs – The One About You | Single Review

“Where did your mind go, Slice?” singer Willow Hawk asks, gently cutting through dreamlike instrumentation as they guide you along a stargazing walk through an enchanted garden late at night. “The One About You,” the newest single from Ohio’s Sonder Bombs, is a song with the same lush illustration of two slow dancers at a homecoming dance as depicted in the music video for Japanese Breakfast’s “Boyish.” This song is the perfect soundtrack for two lonely lovers finding their way towards each other under the night sky and looking up at the moon for some answers. A gentle tune for when the sparks of a new fling carry the conversation into the wee hours of the night. For when nothing else matters but right here, right now, caring only about one person and one moment. 

With “The One About You,” The Sonder Bombs deliver an anthem for the hopeless romantic with the most tender of hearts. It’s a soothing melody that evokes a midnight walk through an enchanted garden. Produced amidst quarantine by Joe Reinhart (Hop Along, Beach Bunny), the track is hypnotizing and magical, but also playful and loving. It is a song full of blissful melodies and lingering phrases that wrap around the listener and slowly consumes them. The Sonder Bombs are best known for defiantly standing their ground, penning bops perfectly fit for screaming into your hairbrush on a lonely Friday night spent dancing around your room. Bringing in a whole new sound with this single, the band shows their ability to craft a gentle, romanticist song complete with guitar lines that carry you through like a walk against the shoreline. 

Showcasing the delicate side of Willow’s vocal techniques and writing style, this single is just a sneak peek into the boundless dynamics and talent featured on the band’s upcoming album Clothbound. Yearning for a perfect night to not be cut short, “won’t you stay up with me” is a delicate but pressing request embedded in tropical guitars and atmospheric bass courtesy of Jimmy Wilkens and Kevin Cappy. With this song, The Sonder Bombs have proven, once again, their ability to write songs for every mood. Featuring a delicate array of horns that carry you back down to earth towards the end, this song transports you into an enchanted paradise and softly back home again. Stream it here and share it with somebody you love.

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Ashley is a disabled, queer music lover living in Denver, CO. She can usually be found with a record spinning, head buried in communist theory, with cats on either side. As a sociology major with a never-ending love for the DIY scene, Ashley enjoys discussing accessibility and accountability in the scene to foster spaces where every single body belongs. Follow her on Twitter at @emomarxist.

In Defense of Illuminaudio: The Forgotten Chiodos Album

When I say the name “Chiodos,” it likely evokes black floral pattern Myspace backgrounds, swoopy emo hair, and songs like “Baby, You Wouldn’t Last A Minute On The Creek.” If you had a scene phase between the years of 2005 and 2010, it’s likely that the band’s output during that time was nothing short of formative to your post-hardcore upbringing. If you were born after the year 2000, it’s likely the band exists more as an emo curiosity and oddball collaborator than anything foundational. Still, Chiodos quickly became a symbolic staple of the Warped Tour scene that now lives on in Emo Nites and throwback high school playlists the world over.

Despite this widespread influence, the band maintained a relatively modest discography of only four albums. Within this collection of records lies a wealth of middle school bangers, soaring falsettos, and enigmatic song titles. While most of the band’s well-known tracks can be found on their first two records, All’s Well That Ends Well and Bone Palace Ballet, the group’s best work also happens to be the one people discuss the least: 2010’s Illuminaudio.

Essentially an orphaned step-child of the band’s discography, Illuminaudio is the only Chiodos album to not feature Craig Owens on vocals, giving both fans and the band themselves a reason to write it off as a one-off collaboration that happened while the lineup sorted itself out. Owens’ replacement, Brandon Bolmer, not only did the band’s legacy justice but elevated the group into a new plane of post-hardcore creativity that existed slightly above the cartoonish gothic imagery of their previous output. 

Even given Brandon Bolmer’s previous work as the lead singer of Yesterday’s Rising, he managed to hone his craft as a writer, performer, and vocalist. Indeed, Bolmer was able to rise to the occasion, meeting Chiodos on their level and quickly building off it. Quite frankly, it’s a shame that this release will probably never get the justice it deserves simply because it will always be viewed as “that album” without Owens. 

Illuminaudio recently celebrated its tenth anniversary on October 5th, and I saw not a single peep of it online. There was no tweet from the band account, no retrospective articles, no reddit discussion posts, no nothing, which made me sad. I get why the band would disavow this record as the one odd-man-out of their discography, but that’s so unfair to the songs because there isn’t a miss in the bunch. 

While the band eventually welcomed Owens back into the fold for 2014’s Devil (along with Thomas Erak of The Fall of Troy), Illuminaudio is an oft-overlooked chapter of the group’s history that has not only aged better than most records of this era, but stands alone as one of Chiodos’ best. It’s unfair to both Bolmer and fans that these songs are left to rot away in obscurity because they are deep, rich, and worth digging into, even if you aren’t a fan of the genre. Unlike the rest of the band’s discography, Illuminaudio is not a relic of the mid-2000s but a genuinely great collection of metal tracks that exist as a completely standalone entity.

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The album kicks off with the scene-setting “Illuminaudio,” a spellbinding journey into the ethereal world of the record. On this track, we hear Brandon Bolmer easing fans into the group’s new era by doing his best Craig Owens impression, mirroring the previous singer’s style over a simplistic instrumental that adds a disarming layer of comfort and familiarity. 

After this swirling two-minute intro, the track begins to disintegrate until a single whispered “stop” pauses the music. That interruption makes way for a solitary heartrate monitor-like note that flows seamlessly into “Caves,” the record’s bombastic lead single. Featuring a sing-along chant and slow-building drumbeat, the song hypes the listener up to a powerful and explosive scream about 30 seconds in that immediately sounds better than anything Owens ever belted. A chuggy guitar line bowls the listener over around the 1-minute mark, paving the way for the band to throw directly to the chorus, an effect that swept me off my feet on my first skeptical listen. 

From there, the band adds an air of scene cred with the Vic Fuentes-assisted “Love Is A Cat From Hell,” essentially legitimizing this era of Chiodos as an official continuation of the band. Meanwhile, “Modern Wolf Hair” beat Kanye to the long-form wolves analogy by about a decade and culminates in a piercing, distorted scream that hits the listener like a punch to the face.

The biggest bummer of Chiodos rewriting the history of this record is that there’s no good reason for it. These songs are as structurally sound, creative, and heavy as anything they’d done before. It’s just that once the group lost their boy band appeal that Owens brought to the table, they found that their songs didn’t connect with their audience in the same way. It’s funny how far something as simple (and non-musical) as a band’s “look” can go in the era of 2010’s post-hardcore. It meant that something as over-the-top and cartoonish as “Baby, You Wouldn’t Last a Minute on the Creek” could succeed because it combined a unique musical style with something that was hyper-marketable. When your band can comfortably exist on an 11x17 poster from Rise Records, that was practically a guarantee you’d sell at least a few thousand records without even trying… but that’s beside the point. 

The instrumentals on Illuminaudio are all as proficient as ever, but Bolmer’s range of both singing and screaming offered something that Owens never had. On top of this, the studio effects they used on Bolmer’s screams made them land better than anything else in the scene at the time. I’d never heard such visceral and propulsive unclean vocals outside of Austin Carlile, but they work on this record because they’re used so sparingly and with such restraint. The screams come either at the climax of each song or are seeded throughout to make individual moments more impactful. It’s really an artistic approach to a genre that was very prone to overusing elements like that at the time. 

Not only that, the band is able to create this sense of cresting emotional impact without even using screams on some songs. Just look at “Notes In Constellations” which begins as a music box-like lullaby which slowly works its way up to a ferocious and biting instrumental attack that resolves with the payoff of a feature-length film.

Songs like “Scaremonger,” “Hey Zeus! The Dungeon,” and “Those Who Slay Together, Stay Together” tread the familiar gothic horror ground as the band’s first two albums, but still do it in a way that feels more artistically elevated and complete than, say, “Is It Progression If a Cannibal Uses a Fork?”

In an album filled with fantastic performances, Bolmer’s best moment comes in “Stratovolcano Mouth” where he works a hypnotic repetition of “Let it all out / Let, let it all out / Let, let it all out / Let, let it go” into a (literal) explosion as he works up to a seconds-long scream of “EXPLODE!!” which sounds downright world-conquering. This passionate delivery is guided by a driving guitar line and a gorgeous string section with a piano thrown in for good measure. It’s textbook Chiodos, and the fact that this song has barely over a half-million plays on Spotify is a flat-out shame. 

Illumiaudio also found the band crafting unique moments that make each song feel different from the ones surrounding it. There’s a heavy-as-shit breakdown at the end of “Let Us Burn One” that’s absolutely skull-crushing. There’s a crazy auto-tuned transition at the end of “Scaremonger,” a group chant/drum roll pairing on “Modern Wolf Hair,” and that aforementioned music box-like technique used on “Notes In Constellations.” This is all capped off with “Closed Eyes Still Look Forward,” a gorgeous piano ballad that ties the entire story of the album up, references previous songs, and loops back to the beginning, all within three minutes. These songs simultaneously stand on their own in isolation and work together to fit into the stark black and gold-hued world of the album. The end result is a collection of 12 songs that all form together into one piece that’s larger than the sum of its parts.

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I know there are a ton of nostalgic Chiodos fans out there who will read this and won’t be able to separate the love for their own mid-2000’s emo phase from the music itself. I’ll admit there’s a TON of nostalgia baked into Illumiaudio for me, but what makes me passionate about this record is how unfairly the band treated it. There are songs here just as worthy of scene worship as anything on the band’s first two records, and I’d argue even more so in some cases. Seeing other bands of this time period like August Burns Red release tenth-anniversary reissues of their early work or bands like The Devil Wears Prada go on tour performing their decade-old albums in full makes me wish Illuminaudio was treated better. 

Regardless, Illumiaudio stands on its own as an album and an artistic statement. It’s punctual, explorative, and walks that fine line between welcoming old fans while still carving out new sonic territories. The instrumentals are finely-crafted, punchy, and creative. Most importantly, Bolmer’s vocals are some of the best ever recorded, and the duality between his piercing high notes and his guttural screams is absolutely otherworldly. 

The way the group meshed all of these instrumental elements together into a wall of sound that’s heavy-hitting yet swirling and ornamental is Chiodos to me. They understood what this band stood for and pushed that creative ethos as far in one direction as they possibly could. The end result was a perfect storm of a new singer and a band at the peak of their artistic ability crafting one of the best, most unfairly-forgotten post-hardcore records of the 2010s. Let us burn one for Illumiaudio.