Algernon Cadwallader – Trying Not to Have a Thought
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Saddle Creek
There’s something cool happening in emo right now. And, no, I’m not talking about Hot Mulligan, Arm’s Length, Pool Kids, or any of the other buzzy fifth-wave bands whose underwhelming 2025 follow-ups left a bad taste in my mouth; I’m talking fourth-wave, baby. I’m talking about the Emo Revival. I’m talking about Philly. More specifically, I’m talking about Trying Not to Have a Thought, the excellent return-to-form album by Algernon Cadwallader. To me, this album arrives at a particularly poignant time and feels connected to… the same class of bands that Algernon has always been adjacent to, actually.
Just a few weeks ago, scene stalwarts The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die released their excellent fifth album Dreams of Being Dust. More angry and indignant than any previous TWIABP album (though certainly seeded in songs like “Invading the World of the Guilty as a Spirit of Vengeance” off Illusory Walls), the record starts with a fucking blast beat and finds the band rightfully furious, writing about the genocide in Gaza, our fraught healthcare system, and wasteful tech-exalting capitalists. They render this frustration in viscous metalcore and fist-balling post-hardcore as they reel from discontent to disbelief.
A couple of weeks later, on September 5th, La Dispute released the fifth and final part of their hour-long megalith No One Was Driving The Car. Proceeded by four EPs pieced out once a month since May, the full record is a tome (as La Dispute are wont to do) with song topics ranging from our technological dystopia to the ongoing environmental disaster that companies are fueling by poisoning our land every day in the name of profit. The album’s title comes from a 2021 incident in which a self-driving Tesla crashed and killed someone in Texas. The whole thing is a harrowing and existential meditation on the world we’re actively building – and how much of it feels out of our control.
Then there’s Trying Not To Have a Thought, the first album from Algernon Cadwallader since 2011 and the first with their original lineup since ‘08. Proceeded by only one single, “Hawk,” on first brush, this felt like a fun reunion record, mostly impressive that the group was able to recreate their sound so pitch-perfectly two decades later. While that first taste of the record is a nostalgic look back at a childhood friendship filled with music and roughhousing, it gradually becomes clear that “Hawk” is a song about grief and missing the things we can never get back. A fitting message for a band making a comeback in this way.
But Trying Not To Have a Thought is a record that thrives on the page, encouraging a close lyrical read.
By track two, the band is talking about “Slave owners and idiot killers” while discussing land ownership and the “500 years American nightmare.” Later on in the record, the band discusses million-dollar anti-homeless architecture, specifically in Portland, Oregon, my hometown, and a city viewed by many as a bastion of leftist politics. One track later, the band takes aim at their own hometown and the 1985 MOVE bombing in which our own government dropped two bombs on a Philly neighborhood that housed the black liberation organization MOVE, killing six adults, five children, and leaving hundreds homeless.
The heart of Trying Not To Have A Thought lies in the one-two punch of its title track and the following song, “You’ve Always Been Here.” In the former, the band attempts to drown out these atrocities by playing dumb, but quickly realizes that approach only works for so long. In one protracted line, vocalist Peter Helmis prattles out “I’m trying not to get caught in the backwash of an artificial world constructed by bloodsucking motherfuckers in an anti-social coliseum pretensions and expectations imposed to manifest a status quo.” On the following track, the group summarizes our dynamic with a tongue-in-cheek line of logic, “Ready to accept that this is the way it’s always been / And so it must not be broke / It’s working so long and we’ve made it this far.”
This is all pretty heavy for a genre that many people paint as ‘whining about girls.’ It’s telling that all of these groups are essentially elder statesmen of the genre; bands who debuted in the Aughts and have either weathered the storm or reassembled into something even more pointed and forceful. These bands are all still recognizable, but they’re using the tools at their disposal to talk about larger, more important topics than they ever have, and shit like that is what makes me proud to be a fan of them. In the case of Algernon, it’s fucking awesome to Trojan Horse these messages into songs titled with weed references and laced with pop culture samples, then use the lyrics to make a real point. It gives me hope that we can all grow gracefully and use our voices in the same way. God knows we need it.
