Pianos Become the Teeth have spent a solid decade reaffirming their reputation as popular post-hardcore’s most deadly serious band. On the centerpiece of their 2009 debut, Old Pride, Kyle Durfey gave an unflinching account of his father suffering from multiple sclerosis, and he commemorated him two years later on “Liquid Courage”: “On the day you died/I cut my hair for the funeral/And on Memorial Day, I started drinking.” His subject matter was rarely any less intense. But in the time since 2014’s Keep You, Durfey got married, became a dad, cut his hair for good, and greenlit videos for uptempo singles with vibrant choreography and his band in neon body paint, daring diehards to make Coldplay comparisons.
Yet Wait for Love defies any expectation that this might be Pianos’ happy album, a move that would likely have alienated their fans even more than Durfey’s decision to stop screaming on Keep You. “Would you believe it? I’m a family man now,” he croons on the closing “Blue,” and he isn’t just overcome by wonder or realizing the grim inheritance of generational trauma. He’s both, and “Blue” reiterates what Wait for Love has made clear: that Pianos Become the Teeth are just as deadly serious about new life and new love as they were about death and loss.
While previous Pianos Become the Teeth albums were never intended to shut people out, they weren’t exactly waiting for an audience to get on their level. Emo standards The Lack Long After and Keep You boast the most devastating music produced by this scene, but they’d be completely impenetrable to listeners who couldn’t withstand their respective scorched-earth swelter and mid-Atlantic winter chill. Wait for Love is the first time a Pianos Become the Teeth album can spin whenever the mood suits. With Will Yip behind the boards, the band hasn’t strayed too far beyond the sound that defined its jump from Topshelf to Epitaph: clean vocals and drums pushed way to the front; crosshatched guitars; a husky, muscular, but never macho sound that could’ve made them post-grunge icons in another era. But the grays in their funereal ambience are now polished silver and the fog has lifted—whereas last time around they drew unexpected comparisons to Scottish mope rock, Wait for Love sounds more like Meet Me in the Bathroom-era New York.
All of these changes become clear in the first minute of “Fake Lighting.” The big reveal on Keep You was that Durfey could actually sing, though melodic craftsmanship was a secondary concern. With a brief falsetto run in his first line, Durfey announces his advancement to singer, and throughout, he’s more economical with his lyrics and more generous with melody. If lacking the conceptual heft of past releases, Wait for Love is a richer, more versatile experience. Only “Blue” is subject to the same hardball tactics of Keep You, matching Durfey’s most brutally, beautifully honest lyrics with a dirge that mirrors his post-confessional exhaustion.
Otherwise, Wait for Love exchanges the deadlift exertion for more nimble musicianship. Having drummer David Haik function in a purely textural or timekeeping capacity was previously a major misallocation of resources, though it was necessary on Keep You to maintain the mournful mood. While the vocals and guitars remain resonant and steely, Haik is given the freedom to set the pulse for these odd and entirely new sensations with his most inventive playing yet.
While Durfey’s subject matter is universal, he still doesn’t write in a universal way. Wait for Love is about his experience, and Durfey took the unusual step of posting a preface on the band’s website that either serves as a collection of cheat codes for his densely referential lyrics. But they’re all love songs, and while Durfey freely includes suggestive post-coital imagery, Wait for Love is about love-making in the metaphysical sense: All of the empty glasses, bleary sunrises, and half-shut blinds are symbols for a kind of intimacy that’s only possible after discovering the difference between being emotional and truly vulnerable.
Yet in the only funny moment to ever occur on a Pianos Become the Teeth album, the chorus of “Charisma” (“The Magothy days slip away”) could easily be heard as “my gothy days slip away,” which might actually be a better way to describe what the song is all about. The physicality of “Charisma” doesn’t appear to leave much to interpretation. It rides a straightforward, locked-in bass thrum, the kind that’s served crushed-out emo songs since Cap’n Jazz took shape. “I caught a stranger’s eye/And what a way you won me over,” Durfey yells on the chorus, and the entirety of his earlier work makes the event all the more impressive: He’s not the type that’s easily won over.
“Charisma” is that kind of love song, for people who never quite saw themselves in the pop fantasy until they were blindsided by reality. And here’s the kicker: If we’re to take Durfey at his word, it’s a love song twice over, of “seeing your son pulled from the womb of the love of your life.” On their beloved “I’ll Get By,” Durfey felt resigned to a life with “no mirth, no levity, no amazing grace” while yelling, “I want to live!” The waiting was the hardest part; accepting and living in love is where Pianos find the will to go fearlessly forward.
