Chasing Fridays: Greet Death, Empty Shell Casing, Winter Q&A, more

I thought this would be a short, breezy edition of Chasing Fridays – a thought that has no historical precedence given my tendency to ramble when the prefixes "nu" and "shoe," and the suffix "core," are on my agenda. So, I'll keep the intro tactically snappy. I wrote about a new band I like, new music from an old band I love, a pop song I had a magical experience with over the weekend, and a couple rising 'core groups who made me pull out my weather vane to forecast some trends. Plus, I interviewed Samira Winter of the great shoegaze band Winter about a bunch of stuff: shoegaze, Yo La Tengo, and Winter (duh).

This House Is Creaking - Something to Digest

I saw this band play under a bridge last weekend. The sun was resisting its nightly set with a late-June stubbornness, and all the young twenty-somethings around me were swigging away their icy exteriors. Their inhibitions would be drowned by cheap beer and bitter flask sips by the end of the evening, but most of them stood stiffly and nodded in silent affirmation for This House Is Creaking. So goes the fate of the opening band at a DIY show, but I was rocking with this group. I had checked out the Chicago band's latest EP, Something to Digest, a few hours before the gig, and I was smitten by the second track, "Talk to Me." A jaunty little indie-pop number that's scribbled with diagonal noodles and punctured with fuzzy pin-pricks.

None of the other songs on Something to Digest sound quite like it, which makes me all the more intrigued by the unreleased full-length I picked up from their merch booth yet still haven't popped in my CD player. "Whisper" sounds like that band The Obsessives (remember them?) pivoting to Spirit of the Beehive-core; quirky, rattling indie-rock that can't hide its mathy emo roots no matter how many pedals lay atop its board. "Say Something" is steamier and funkier, a little too "bro, Channel Orange tho.." for a band like this to pull off. The title-track closer is indeed "Something to Digest," an aqueous post-rock instrumental that I'd enjoy hearing fanned out in greater detail. Between this EP and their Bleary Eyed-ish May single "BubbleGuts," This House Is Creaking have enough good ideas and oddball instincts to land a spot on my ever-lengthening "keep an eye on this one" shortlist.

Greet Death - "Love Me When You Leave"

I could go on about this whole record because I think the whole thing is a triumph (I took a broader view of it with this interview). But right now, I want to write about this particular song because I believe that it's one of the best songs Greet Death have ever written. "Love Me When You Leave" is the finale to Die In Love, and like all the best Greet Death songs, it's the type of song I want to hear when the earth caves in on itself and all of the continents begin sliding down into the abyss and all us humans are faced to choose between desperate panic or serene acceptance.

I don't know which I'd choose. Probably panic at first (Greet Death's "Panic Song" would work well for that option, fwiw). And then, ideally, I'd realize that my stress won't prevent the skylines from crumbling and the trees from buckling and the oceans from draining, and I'd have a brief seven minutes worth of breaths left to take. Seven minutes that I'd spend listening to Harper Boyharti murmur wistfully about feelings passing and people fading. About how "once you're gone you're never coming back." The drums would whisk lightly while I watched birds fall from the sky. The guitars would strum gently like a rocking chair's steady pulse as glass from shattered car windows piled up on the crumbling streets.

And just as my perch atop a city park disintegrated beneath my feet and death's gravitational chains began yanking me into the seething canyon, I'd have the fortune of hearing Logan Gaval's peaceful coos whistling through my headphones during my freefall descent. Most Greet Death songs are heavy: wailing guitars, leadened feelings of despair. "Love Me When You Leave" is weightless. The groove it concludes with drifts buoyantly like dandelion seeds floating obliviously in hurricane gusts. Or like a body careening soporifically into nothingness.

Greet Death. Die In Love. This band are fixated on confronting finality. Their whole discography is comprised of grave contemplations and potential last words. To me, "Love Me When You Leave" is their most enchanting conclusion. It's realistic about the passing of people and the passing of lives, but it's content with those terrifying inevitabilities in a way Greet Death never have been. It's not a cautionary tale, but a bit of instructive wisdom on how to greet...life.

Addison Rae - "Summer Forever"

I had this record rolling in the car over the weekend while my friends and I cruised across town to get ice cream after spending an afternoon hopping in and out of the pool as the sun scorched our skin. My a/c was cranking and we were all in that subdued trance state that happens when the heat's zapped your energy so much that you don't even try to fight the rumbles of the road as they lull you into a subdued daze. This song came on when we were a half-mile down the long, urban tarmac from our destination.

My car crawled across the pavement from one stoplight to the next and the music's narcotic purr made me feel like the wheel was turning in slow motion. The cool air pouring from the vents kissed my pores like sherbet frost, and the horizon seemed to ripple and swirl as I gazed upward through my chlorinated corneas and sunscreen-smeared shades. In my memory bank, the feeling of summer isn't catalogued in two-month marathons of poolside days and bottle-clinking nights. It's 30-second flashes like these. Interstitial moments where a song briefly becomes the oxygen that fuels summer's eternal flame.

I Promised the World, Empty Shell Casing, Lake Verity @ Preserving Underground

I am nothing if not a critic who's fixated on subcultural hardcore trends. Last year it was deathcore. The year before it was metalcore. Now it's screamo and...nu-metalcore? Two of the most interesting heavy bands in the world right now, Empty Shell Casing and I Promised the World (fka Sinema), played to 40 kids in a DIY space the other night, and the whole time I was thinking, "This is going to be a cool flex in 2027." Like many artists who pique my fascination, Empty Shell Casing and I Promised the World aren't personal favorites of mine. I'm casually agreeable to one (Empty Shell Casing) and coolly indifferent to the other (I Promised the World), but what made this show such a can't-miss event for me is the upward trajectory both of these bands are on and their cultural importance within the scenes they currently occupy.

I'll start with Empty Shell Casing since they're the more curious of the two. The Texas sextet dropped their debut EP, And Slowly...As I Turn My Back, on Ephyra Recordings last fall; a zany, bulging, swagged-out barrage of apoplectic nu-metal with a bludgeoning metalcore (of the hardcore-adjacent variety) twist. The band have two vocalists – one of whom is also a DJ, which is so dope – and several of their members played in various other Texas bands including Since My Beloved and Fifteen Rhema: fellow Ephyra metalcore bands, the former defunct and the latter ongoing. Empty Shell Casing played a different venue in Pittsburgh earlier this spring and hardcore kids moshed like animals. This time, the vibe was more jumpy and effervescent, at least until the vocalist ordered all the moshers into the pit to beat ass to a cover of Chimaira's "Resurrection" (a fascinating choice, and a crucial indication that Empty Shell Casing are as loyal to NWOAHM-era metalcore as they are nu-metal underdogs like Snot, who their bassist repped on his t-shirt).

Although people like to credit (not incorrectly, but far too narrowly) TikTok with spurring the "nu-metal revival," this increasingly exhausting rehabilitation has been happening in hardcore for nearly a decade now. Code Orange and Vein were dribbling Slipknot breakbeats into their sound way back in 2017, and then a whole wave of lame-ass bands (Orthodox, Chamber, Vended, Tetrarch, and countless others backed by corporate metal money) have been trying to Make Nu-Metalcore Happen for the last eight years. None of these bands have truly broken through in the way Knocked Loose, Lorna Shore, or, hell, Sleep Token have, and I'm skeptical that Empty Shell Casing will be the ones to do it.

But I'm also devilishly inclined to entertain the possibility that they might. Chiefly because unlike all of those other nu-metalcore groups playing stale, overproduced hardcore draped with a Korn filter, Empty Shell Casing are a genuinely exciting band. Fashion is as much a part of nu-metal as the sound, and Empty Shell Casing's members look fucking cool. Onstage, they thrash and boogie and headbang and stunt and remove their shirts and shove their guitars into ceiling pipes. They carry themselves in a way that's both endearingly quaint and concerningly mischievous. And their music – wiggly, quick-cutting, unsuspectingly bruising – is throttingly fun. I don't think there'll ever be another Slipknot, but watching Empty Shell Casing live makes me want to believe there could be.

Empty Shell Casing are brimmed beanie in the summertime music. I Promised the World are tilted cadet cap music. The Empty Shell Casing tourmates are also from Texas, and their most significant releases have also dropped on Ephyra Recordings. (Ephyra is, genuinely, one of the most important rock labels of the 2020s, and one day I'll write a dissertation on why that's the case.) They don't make nu-metal, they make music that could facilitate a two-hour-long tug-of-war debate between someone who calls them "screamo" and another who calls them "post-hardcore." While my millennial inclinations are prodding me to go with "post-hardcore" – because I Promised the World sound like Thursday, Senses Fail, Saosin, and any other number of Victory/Equal Vision Records bands who tried to make a go at VH1 success in the early 2000s – I'm going to cede to zoomer taxonomy and call them screamo, because I Promise the World presently live within the modern-day screamo scene (this type of screamo – what many of my millennial peers might call metalcore).

I Promised the World are an interesting band to me because they do in fact feel primed for major success. Their members are conventionally attractive. The singer has sideburns and a sideways ballcap that make him look like the 22-year-old emo boys whose AP Magazine photos lined my bedroom in high-school. Two members of the band can actually sing clean choruses, and most of the fans in the room were more interested in piling on the mic for the nasally refrains than the shrieked screams. I think they've yet to write an undeniable banger of a tune, and I prefer the heavier (and sadly defunct, as the screamo half-life remains a year-and-change) bands on their recent threeway split with onewaymirror and kiowa. But I've been around long enough to be able to hear (and see) when a band of this style have the juice. Both Empty Shell Casing and I Promised the World are dripping with juice. Now, we wait for lemonade.

Chasing Down

SAMIRA WINTER
of
Winter

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

Winter, the shoegaze band helmed by singer-songwriter Samira Winter, have been making music I enjoy for many years now. Their 2020 album, Endless Space (Between You & I), is a delightful dose of dream-pop, and Winter's 2022 album, What Kind of Blue Are You?, is one of my favorite shoegaze records of the decade. I recently wrote about enjoying "Just Like a Flower," the first single from Winter's follow-up LP, Adult Romantix, and I'm happy to report that the other single from this album, "Misery," is beatific, sentimental, and mesmerizingly distorted – exactly how I like my shoegaze.

For this edition of Chasing Down, I asked Winter about her latest musical obsession, two of her favorite bands (My Bloody Valentine and Yo La Tengo), her great EP with Hooky from earlier this year, and how she approached Adult Romantix. Read the full Q&A below.

What was the last band you became obsessed with? 

Userband, specifically the song “I Lose My Time.” I listen to this song everyday. I feel like she and I are best friends. There’s just this gushing sense of summer bliss that is enveloped by a warm blanket of fuzz. It soothes all my pain away like a Smashing Pumpkins song.