“I hate ‘em, there’s no love in the world for me,” Julian Pratt moaned in “Arcanum,” the embittered climax to Show Me the Body’s 2019 album, Dog Whistle. For the majority of its 17-year existence, Pratt’s experimental punk band has been an outlet for that sort of negativity: the pained outbursts of a New York City native who spent most of his youth “guided by fear, hate, and aggression,” as Pratt admitted in a recent interview. However, in the four years since Show Me the Body’s last album, the banjo-slinging frontman’s perspective has changed dramatically. He became a father, weathered the tragic death of a personal mentor, and decided to reorient his life around a different set of values. “Radical love, it compels me to fight,” Pratt hollers in “Eat for Peace,” the first of many fist-raising anthems on Show Me the Body’s vigorous new album, Alone Together.
Don’t think that means they’ve gone soft. Pratt, an avowed anarchist and a vehemently anti-Zionist person of Jewish faith, doesn’t scale back the anger in his voice or the aggression in his band’s sound. Rather, he and his bandmates—co-founding multi-instrumentalist Harlan Steed and recently appointed drummer Nijol Benjamin—wield their rage with a more tactical array of songwriting conventions. While 2022’s Trouble the Water embraced the jagged edges of Show Me the Body’s sludgy punk-metal sound, Alone Together is a sleek and streamlined album that includes their most agreeable songs yet. The murky hip-hop and scalding noise elements that defined their early work are pared back in favor of stronger melodies and brighter production courtesy of Kenneth Blume, the hip-hop producer who’s becoming an in-demand engineer for rock bands with big personalities (Geese, IDLES).
Blume’s unobtrusive handiwork lifts Show Me the Body out of the shadows without sun-bleaching their craggy exterior. “No God” and “Dance in the USA” are built around moshable breakdowns that approach djent-metal levels of synchronized decimation. Although they claim the title of New York hardcore, and therefore rep the region’s bruised and battered sound, Show Me the Body’s music has always been closer to Beastie Boys than Biohazard. Brute force has never been their forte, but these songs and the record’s thwomping title track boast some of the most floor-splitting grooves in their whole repertoire. It’s gratifying to hear a band who’ve always teetered on the edge of hardcore proudly adopt the genre’s fundamental appeals, but it’s even more satisfying when Show Me the Body are in singalong mode.
The record’s best track is “Do What’s Right (Happy)”, a Nirvana-esque dose of downer-grunge where Pratt unloads about self-harm, violence, and substance abuse, all of which offer cheap jolts of toxic happiness. The song has a tantalizing chord progression and a creepy, muttery vocal delivery where Pratt resembles Iggy Pop on “Gimme Danger” crossed with Thurston Moore on “Death Valley ’69.” The band have never sounded so coolly deranged, and lyrically, “Do What’s Right (Happy)” reinforces that Pratt’s goal to harness strength through love remains a work in progress. His struggles aren’t solved; he’s just found a new means of battling them.
When Show Me the Body fully commit to either their heaviest or catchiest tendencies, Alone Together sounds like a spirited reinvention. It’s when they tepidly gesture toward their more experimental past that the record lags. The three spoken-word interstitials (“Overture,” “Interlude,” “Finale”) each sound like they’re building to a rapped verse that never quite arrives, which makes them feel like throwaways compared to the more fully realized curveballs on the band’s Corpus mixtapes. Meanwhile, without the staticky textures and scalding noise layers that made Trouble the Water so visceral, cuts like the softer “Trust” and the redundantly chuggy “New Line” feel limp. There’s altogether less friction on Alone Together, which serves some ideas well while refining others to the point of dullness.
More often than not, though, Show Me the Body is at their sharpest and most persuasive on Alone Together. “We can be friends/You don’t have to harm yourself,” Pratt intones assuredly during “Eat for Peace.” It’s a message that's more reflective of Show Me the Body’s live shows, where their pluralistic crowds—punks, hardcore kids, and indie-rap fans alike—flail and seethe in mutual catharsis instead of traditional hardcore combat. In that sense, despite the freshened up sound, Alone Together flaunts what Show Me the Body have always been about: the isolation of being outcasts and the shared experience of being individuals.
