Touché Amoré have been around for just under a decade, but they’ve already ascended from stalwarts of the Long Beach punk community, to flag-bearers of the American post-hardcore renaissance, to the heaviest band managed by Roc Nation. They’ve shared stages with heavy-hitters like Converge and AFI, and even played Jay Z’s Made in America festival last month alongside Rihanna, Coldplay, and Lil Wayne. Anyone who’s heard Touché’s racket—a leaden mix of serrated guitar leads, head-spinning tempos, and frontman Jeremy Bolm’s impassioned screams—knows that it’s not exactly poppy; but what the band lack in a universally-adored sound, they make up for twice-over with timeless themes.
Bolm’s hyper-confessional lyrics are a beacon of hope to anyone plagued by anxiety, depression, toxic relationships, and general self-doubt. Touché’s journey is Bolm’s journey, and the band’s output thus far has belied the stereotypical arc where the frontman battles then conquers his demons. Their first two albums, 2009’s *…To The Beat Of A Dead Horse *and 2011’s Parting the Sea Between Brightness and Me, showed a man at war with himself, struggling to navigate relationships personal and artistic amid anxiety's unyielding fog. Two years later, on 2013’s ambitious Is Survived By, he appeared on the precipice of climbing out of that pit of doubt. “It’s not for nothing, but I’ve seen a transformation,” he reported on “Social Caterpillar,” “Like I consider my happiness for the first time in ages.”
And then it all fell apart. On Halloween 2014, in a cramped concert hall in Gainesville, Florida where Touché Amoré were performing as part of annual punk blowout The Fest, Bolm received word from his family back in California that his mother Sandy had died following a long battle with cancer. Understandably, the loss—and the fact that he couldn’t be by Sandy’s bedside when she passed away—tore him to shreds. When one of your parents dies, you never really recover; all you can do is sift through the memories and hold tight to the ones that make you smile. Or you can write an album about it, which brings us to Stage Four, Touché Amoré’s best album.
Grief gathers its strength from fine details: childhood memories, sun-faded postcards, the box of Cheez-Its that never got thrown away. It’s difficult to render those artifacts as universal truths, especially to those who have been lucky (or young) enough to have avoided the experience. *Stage Four *definitely doesn’t have that problem. Instead, its vivid imagery, anthemic arrangements, and unsuspecting listenability position it as hardcore’s Carrie & Lowell: an autobiographical tragedy that soars in spite of an overwhelming urge to succumb.
Whereas past albums have traditionally tasked guitarists Clayton Stevens and Nick Steinhart with all of the heavy lifting, wedding every syllable that falls forth from their leader’s mouth to a ragged note, *Stage Four *sees Bolm taking a stronger melodic initiative. Roughly one-third of the album’s tracks bear his abyssal murmur, a hoarse monotone landing somewhere between Kurt Cobain and Gregorian monk. His clean vocals on “Water Damage” and “Palm Dreams” are unlikely to earn him a spot on *The Voice, *but it’s to the band’s benefit: There’s still plenty of room for Stevens and Steinhart to churn out the heavy riffs.
The remaining space is filled up by Bolm's memories, expressed invariably with blunt, self-scrutinizing detail. On “Eight Seconds,” he recalls the exact moment he learned of his mother’s passing, conjuring the moment painfully and cumulatively, gasp by gasp: “A missed call with a message attached/‘We need to talk when you have a chance’/I stood frozen in that Gainesville venue/Not knowing how to react.’” By the next track (“Palm Dreams”), he’s back in California at his childhood home, sorting through his mother's belongings in solitude (“I dug through 40 years/All alone/On my own”) and lamenting his failure to address “the questions that went unasked/That appear when time has passed”–namely, how Sandy came to arrive in California at the first place. After an extensive guilt-trip, he vows to “find connections through extensions” (this album, perhaps?) and commends anyone on the listening end who’s experienced a similar hell: “It’s a rite of passage/It’s a torch to carry/When you feel that damage/And it’s extraordinary.”
Melodic shifts and thematic focus notwithstanding, *Stage Four *isn’t too far removed from the turbulent post-hardcore showcased on Is Survived By, a similarity largely owed to the production: muffled guitar roaring in the front, staccato cymbals clattering in the back, whirling feedback throughout. Both albums were produced by Brad Wood, famed sonic architect behind Liz Phair’s *Exile in Guyville *and Sunny Day Real Estate’s *Diary, *two similarly confessional classics. His mix for closer “Skyscraper,” a devastating duet with folk balladeer Julien Baker, which juxtaposes the duo’s whispered, steadily-strengthening pleas for closure with a phased, shoegaze-y backdrop. Intimacy meets infinity.
At last, they clamber back up from rock bottom to the literal top of the world. The album concludes atop a Manhattan skyscraper late one night, as Bolm gazes out at the bright urban sprawl 102 stories below. A few minutes before, on “Water Damage”, the man had declared that he’d yet to recover. But as he stands as close as he can to a heaven he wants so desperately to believe in, he realizes the sheer scope of it all—New York City, life, death, art—and finds comfort in it. “You live there, under the lights,” he observes, Baker’s angelic coos not far behind. “New York City/It’s all yours.” He's brought his mother back to life as both a saint of the infinite city and a crucible of hope for the rest of us.
