Chasing Fridays: Deafheaven, Cloud Nothings, Maura Weaver Q&A, more

Phew, what a week! I honestly didn't listen to very much new music over the last seven days. I've simply been too preoccupied with live music. Last weekend, I visited my home city for some hardcore shenanigans, and then the day after returning to Pittsburgh, my friends and I darted off to Columbus, OH to witness some blackgaze. Then, instead of settling into my normal weekly routine, I saw three more shows this week (including Cannibal Corpse the night this newsletter goes live). It's been a while since I reviewed live music in Chasing Fridays, so I decided to dedicate most of this week's dispatch to some on-the-ground reporting.

I covered three of those shows in this edition, and of course used the gigs as a springboard to write more broadly about where some of these veteran bands currently stand. I also reviewed one new EP and did an interview with the songwriter Maura Weaver about her great new solo record Strange Devotion. All of that down below. Oh, and if you missed it on my socials, I wrote an extensive profile of They Are Gutting a Body of Water that Stereogum published earlier this week. If you care what I have to say about shoegaze, modern indie-rock, or just love a gripping story about a fascinating figure, I recommend giving that a read.

Yorck Street - My Small Piano

I found this band Yorck Street in a "cloudrock" playlist someone made back in July. They're from Berlin and have two EPs to their name. They have that quintessential cloud-rock quality where their songs sound endlessly tinkered with and also half-finished. Last year's self-titled release has a 40-second song called "nerds" that's the musical equivalent of catching a whiff of something delicious while strolling past a restaurant, only to lose the scent as soon as your mouth begins to water.

This month's My Small Piano is twee-er and more acoustic. The stripped-back "Preamp" drips like a leaky slowcore spigot, and the wistful "Reading Circle" centers a vignette about reluctantly turning down sex with someone for the greater good of not making shit awkward. The best track is far and away "Smalley," a chiming, swirling, lightly drunken romp where Yorck Street actually let you sit down and taste the damn meal. Yum!

Haywire, Missing Link, Azshara, Who Decides, Fatal Consequences @ a gym in Rochester, NY

I visited my hometown of Rochester, NY over the weekend to hit this utterly stacked hardcore show. There's a pretty thriving hardcore scene in Western, NY right now (Syracuse especially, but Buffalo and Rochester, too) and it was cool to see a couple hundred people flock to this fully-functional CrossFit gym for a lineup that was well worth the 4.5 hours of travel. Fatal Consequences are a Syracuse beatdown band made up of hard-moshing young heads, and Who Decides are a USHC troupe boasting members of Such Gold, Taking Meds, All 4 All, California Cousins, and many other WNY punk/emo/hardcore bands. The dancefloor was only sporadically active for these sets, but I saw someone knock into a rack of 50-pound plates and worried about the potential for workout gear weaponry once the bigger bands took the (floor) stage.

Syracuse metalcore revivalists Azshara played one of my favorite sets of 2024 at last year's Upstate Unity fest in Rochester, and even though I wasn't crazy about their EP from earlier this year, their serrated sound got me on the dancefloor and properly jolted the room awake. Missing Link are one of the hottest bands on the uber-heavy side of the hardcore spectrum, and vocalist Mike Ryan has long lived in Rochester, which made this something of a hometown show for the band. I'm typically spoiled by Pittsburgh's notoriously high-caliber pit violence, and often find hardcore reactions in other cities to be underwhelming. Not this set. A battalion of jacked 30-somethings who look like they frequent this gym during business hours jumped in the warzone and swung into the crowd with a bloodthirsting abandon. I was actually scared to stand next to the pit, which means it was a proper Missing Link set.

But of course, this was a Haywire show at the end of the night. As I wrote extensively after seeing their awe-inspiring Pittsburgh gig back in May, Haywire are the biggest – and best, at least live – new band in hardcore. They just completed a 100+ date tour back in August, and this was the Boston band's first show in Rochester. Unlike the other bands on this bill, Haywire are a sing-along hardcore band, and mobs of fans fought to grab the mic during "Summer Nights" and "Love Song," which already feel like generational staples that will long outlive this epoch of hardcore. The whole set was electric, but Haywire closed with their hooligan fisticuffs anthem "Like a Train," igniting the room into a giddy brawl while fans knocked through one another while chanting its glorious scoundrel refrain – "Get the fuck out of my way!" A week-and-a-half later, my arm is still bruised from this show, and I smile fondly every time I feel it ache.

Deafheaven, Harms Way, I Promised the World live @ Bloodstone in Columbus, OH

Deafheaven are one of two bands with "heaven" in their names that I somehow never saw live until this week. I had no intention of traveling to Columbus for this show until my friend twisted my arm, and even then, I wasn't frothing at the mouth during the ride across state lines. I like Deafheaven a normal amount for someone who loves shoegaze and various breeds of extreme music. I thought their album from earlier this year, Lonely People With Power, was a beastly return to form after the disappointingly snoozey Infinite Granite, but Deafheaven aren't a band that I find myself listening to with any regularity. In a way, I think going into this show without any real expectations was a good move.

I didn't know what Deafheaven's live show would be like in 2025. I remember watching video from their semi-famous set at Pitchfork fest 2014 and thinking that they came off as pretentious and stilted. They were the hipster metal band at that point in time, but I don't think Deafheaven carry that cultural baggage anymore. I don't know what a "hipster metal" band even is in 2025 (maybe Chat Pile?), but Deafheaven didn't perform like one. Frontman George Clarke ran out onstage in a black sleeveless shirt and twirled around with a frisky verve. He was calling for crowdsurfers to "get up here" and spinning his pointer finger around to instigate circle pits. The aloof introversion that I associated with Deafheaven was nowhere to be found. Clarke was hamming it up in a way that was unabashedly Heavy Metal, not "hipster metal."

I don't know Deafheaven's discography well enough to identify songs by their title, but I recognized the Sunbather cuts when they played them. They were good, but most of the set consisted of Lonely People With Power songs, and the sheer venom of those tracks made for a much more intriguing spectacle. The crowd was a healthy mix of archetypes – fist-pumping heshers, scrawny hardcore kids, and yeah, plenty of bespectacled millennials – and no one seemed bummed that the band were playing mostly new stuff. I was certainly stoked. If you can see Deafheaven during this tour, even if it means getting home at 2:30 a.m. on a Monday night after a 3.5-hour drive, do it.

Superheaven, Cloud Nothings, End It, Soul Blind live @ Preserving in Pittsburgh, PA

I also saw Superheaven for the first time this week. I've been a fan of the grunge revivalists since their 2013 debut, Jar. An album that's become primarily associated with "Youngest Daughter," a gauzy grunge-gaze tune that randomly blew up on TikTok in 2023 and totally revitalized Superheaven's modest career: earning them a Gold certification, a new record deal, and a whole new audience of Zoomers to play for. Personally, I don't think "Youngest Daughter" is even among Superheaven's 10 best songs, but it was fascinating to hear the room cheer ecstatically when the band strummed its opening chords, every phone in the room rising in unison like Civil War soldiers pointing their guns on the battlefield.

Superheaven were good. Husky, gnarled, powerful. End It were, as always, very good. Soul Blind I didn't see. I don't care for them. However, the band I had the strongest mental reaction to was Cloud Nothings. Even though they're billed as direct support on this tour, End It were clearly the second-most popular band who played. I think I was literally one of two people in the room who knew a single Cloud Nothings lyric. The Cleveland band are in a very strange place in their trajectory right now, and I say this as someone who loves Cloud Nothings. They're writing some of the best music of their career (2024's Final Summer was amazing, and 2021's The Shadow I Remember was also great; both considerable level-ups from their late-2010s stuff) and are playing to audiences who don't give a fuck about them whatsoever.

Clearly, someone told Cloud Nothings – a punky, noisy, briskly catchy indie band who were championed by Pitchfork in the early 2010s, and existed in the formal Indie-Rock milieu for many years – that they could expand their audience if they played in front of pop-punk, emo, and hardcore fans. While I can see the logic behind that idea on paper, I've now seen Cloud Nothings perform on two package tours with a hodge-podge of punk/emo/hardcore bands, and they felt completely out of place both times. In late 2023, shortly after Cloud Nothings signed to pop-punk/emo/hardcore powerhouse Pure Noise Records (a signing that I'm still scratching my head over), they toured with The Menzingers and Microwave. At that show, I once again felt like I was one of two people in the room who actually knew the band and actively cared to hear what they were playing.

The other night, End It got the whole room riled up to their radical hardcore invectives, and then all the energy settled while Cloud Nothings played a less-than-full-hearted tour of their catalog. I scanned the crowd while I mouthed along to "Stay Useless" and didn't see a single lip moving. Cloud Nothings' heaviest songs are wild enough to theoretically spur some push-pit action, but none of the young whippersnappers in the room moved a muscle. When they closed with "Wasted Days," Dylan Baldi howled the line, "I thought I would be more than this," to a packed house of tepid stares and limply nodding necks. I'm not going to lie: it stung to watch.

I'm not really sure where Cloud Nothings should go in 2026. I saw them play their own headliner in Pittsburgh last spring and the 450-cap room wasn't even half-full. The band at least seemed a little more confident and cheery during that trip, and the fans who were there appreciatively roared along to "Wasted Days" and "Stay Useless" with the throat-shredding gusto that those songs deserve. However, considering the meager turnout, I can see why Cloud Nothings are scrambling to break in with a different crowd. The indie-rock zeitgeist they came up in has completely shifted. A comparable band like Japandroids feel wholly irrelevant to indie-rock in 2025, and I don't see any contemporary pockets where Cloud Nothings fit snugly. What I do know is this: based on what I witnessed at this ill-suited package tour, the youngest daughters aren't rocking with Cloud Nothings. Take it from me, an eldest son.

Chasing Down

MAURA WEAVER
of
Maura Weaver, Mixtapes, Ogikubo Station

Chasing Down is a Q&A series with artists, friends, and others of good taste.

Maura Weaver is an artist I've been listening to since high-school. I don't say that sentence very often because I mostly listened to irredeemably corny music in high-school, but Weaver used to co-front the Cincinnati band Mixtapes, one of the finest – and most redeemable – pop-punk bands of the "Defend Pop-Punk" era. After Mixtapes broke up about a decade back, Weaver played in other bands including Ogikubo Station with Asian Man Records' Mike Park. In 2023, she released her first ever solo record, I Was Due for a Heartbreak, a selection of jangly, lightly fuzzy, heavily melancholy power-pop songs. I liked it. But I like her follow-up record, Strange Devotion, even better.

Strange Devotion (out today via Cinci's own Feel It Records) is a much more dynamic and stylistically diverse album. Weaver already proved herself to be a charming singer and relatable lyricist back in her Mixtapes days, but Strange Devotion sounds like the record where she really found her voice as a songwriter. From the mid-tempo crunch of "Do Nothing" and twangy balladry of "Visine Recall," to the heart-wrenching candidness of "Museum Glass" (a song about an abusive relationship) and the good-humored sensuality of "Cool Imagination," Strange Devotion is at once emotionally complex and musically eclectic – not to mention hella catchy.

For this week's Chasing Down Q&A, I asked Weaver about Fountains of Wayne, her favorite underrated power-pop band, flexing the full bulk of her songwriting muscles with Strange Devotion, and then a question about Mixtapes. Read the full interview below.

This record sounds quite a bit different than your first solo LP from a couple years ago. Tell me about your vision going into this record: how you wanted it to sound and what you wanted to sing about. 

I'm glad you think so – I intentionally wanted it to sound "bigger" production wise, but also wanted to expand my songwriting into different territories. The last record was kind of an emotional downer so I inherently wanted this record to be livelier and more upbeat. It's a lot more rock-oriented than the first record. There are still love songs, but I also tackled some different topics like dealing with misogyny, capitalism in the music industry, past trauma, trying to appreciate my home even when things feel hopeless.

I read somewhere that you were inspired by Fountains of Wayne while making this record. What's your favorite FOW song? 

Oh yeah. I'm always inspired by them to be honest, they're huge for me – I got into them during Mixtapes time and have been influenced by their songwriting for a long time. But I definitely tried to tap into their energy more on this record. I was really into "Denise" while I was making the album and how it emulates The Cars. I don't know if I can pick one favorite (I'm sorry lol) but my top three are probably "Mexican Wine," "Hey Julie," and "Sink to the Bottom."