The second track on Somersaults, the sleek new deathcrash album, is named for New York City. Though the band itself hails from London, the song title calls to mind a couple comparisons for its music. The first is the novel A Little Life, whose endless suffering evokes their longest, bleakest songs. The second is the Strokes. Not long ago, when deathcrash specialized in gut-churning slowcore, “RIYL: The Strokes” might have seemed very stupid. (“Guy who has only heard of two bands,” a hypothetical quote tweet reads.) But when Tiernan Banks lets loose with the distinctive drawl of Julian Casablancas circa 2003 on “NYC,” the song’s title only cements the likeness.
It’s not the only time the band pulls off this trick on its third record. From these post-rock gnostics, such a pastiche of indie rock past is perhaps an unexpected turn (a “somersault” indeed). But while deathcrash masters this rich source material on Somersaults, their turn away from ethereal art-rock and toward sad-boy balladry sacrifices the complex worldbuilding that once made them singular.
deathcrash began nearly a decade ago as a dreary slowcore band whose songs could last 15 minutes and whose suffering seemed to span 15 eternities. (A memorable early lyric: “And if you die by suicide, my blue heaven/Then thank you just for telling me/And doing all you could.”) Somersaults, their sharpest-sounding release, continues a trajectory they began on 2023’s Less: attempting to broach existential burdens with simpler, more conventional songcraft. Grief and groveling remain central here, as does the streamlined feel Less soft-launched. (Doomed! Depressed! Direct about it!) But this solidifying direction comes with a caveat, as “NYC” makes clear—the “new sound” is of a band in transition, trying on several old ones: a crushing Duster imitation on “Wrong to Suffer,” a fuzzbox-mashing Title Fight replica on “Stay Forever,” a synthy Beach House rip on “Marie’s Last Dance.” In the past, post-rock’s drawn-out simmer seemed uniquely apt for the band’s concerns of lives lived and lost and longed for. Somersaults scans that big, sulking sprawl and asks: Can all this sorrow fit in a suitcase?
It seems it will have to. The narrators of Somersaults are weary, well-traveled men, skulking through “Shy Town,” driving lovers back to London, playing tag in Norwegian living rooms, couch-surfing in California, or staying with mom and dad for the weekend. Banks summons these wretched souls in disjunctive hush-speak, stringing together psalms for sullen people: I’m allowed to suffer. I am so much more than I can cope with. I lay howling, incessant. This is not new lyrical ground for a man who once declared “the dark will all be mine.” But a perk of their newly pared-down songcraft is pacing—streamlining Banks’ immense sorrow while sustaining its gravity. The unchanging chord progression of “CMC” is ransomed by its buildup, from drumless arpeggios to twinkling synth stabs to a torturous denouement. And “The Things You Did” is devastating almost because of how predictable it is: a loud-quiet-loud squall whose chorus, arena-sized and inevitable, is as gutting as a missed call from the morgue.
The strength of Somersaults lies in this impulse to strip away the fluff—stray voice memos, sprawling instrumental passages—and reveal the bleeding heart beneath. Yet as deathcrash downsizes their sound, they also downsize their ceiling, leaving less room for their specialty: scoring the long, slow sprawl of life in odysseys burdened by the weight of the world. Though their pastiches are well-executed, they feel dangerously devoid of deathcrash. Narrowing their horizons has allowed them to amplify their anguish, but presents an unintended risk: excising their distinctive identity, too.
