Chasing Fridays: Pain of Truth, sixth-wave emo, Caden Clinton Q&A, more

I've got announcements! The first is that I reviewed the highly disappointing new Menzingers album for Pitchfork. I think the piece speaks for itself, so go read that if you're so inclined. The second, much more exciting, announcement is that Chasing Sundays has received a facelift! I hired the immensely talented graphic artist Molly Soda to redesign a few elements of my site: a new homepage banner, a new orb logo, and some snazzy new templates for my posts on the Chasing Sundays Instagram. I've been wanting to revamp the appearance of Chasing Sundays for a long while, and I'm super pleased with the designs that Molly came up with. Chasing Sundays finally looks the way I've always envisioned it in my head, and I hope you all agree that it now looks doper than ever.

My writing of course remains the same. For this week's Chasing Fridays, I wrote about some hardcore, some emo, some subterranean internet pop, and then shared some thoughts on a couple older albums that I've been rinsing lately. Lastly, I have a very special guest for this week's Chasing Down Q&A. Caden Clinton, drummer of Pool Kids and my beloved roommate, is on da blog letting me pick his brain about what he's been listening to lately. Caden finds more new music than almost anyone I know, and he's tapped in to the underground to a degree that astounds me. He's found so many artists months or years before the industry bigwigs (and littlewigs) have caught on, and as you'll see in the below interview, he knows his shit. Read to hear the future.

Pain of Truth - "Unforgiven"

I was wondering when Pain of Truth were going to return with fresh music, and then boom – a new song hit my inbox. The Long Island band are one of the more popular hardcore groups of the 2020s, and they've attained that status both by touring incessantly and honing a formidable discography with very little bloat. As I recently wrote, I loved their 2023 debut, Not Through Blood, when it dropped, and it remains one of my favorite hardcore LPs of the decade to this day. I've admittedly gotten a bit tired of seeing those songs – and the ones from their 2020 EP – live half a dozen times in recent years, and their 2025 split with Sunami contained their least memorable tracks to date. But I still feel very positively about Pain of Truth overall, and I had high hopes that this new track would bang.

Contrary to what the genre's peanut gallery are saying on the hardcore-focused music app Krate, "Unforgiven" achieves everything a Pain of Truth track should. Sure, it's probably their 15th song about an acrimonious fallout with someone frontman Michael Smith used to hold near and dear, but lyrics have never been more than mosh callout fodder in Pain of Truth's oeuvre. They're very much a sound over substance type hardcore band, and if you don't like their sleek and chunky style of bone-breaking NYHC, then they're probably not for you. But I do, and I like "Unforgiven." I like the wailing clean chorus - "looooost caaaaaause" – and I like the climactic mosh part, which is familiarly clobbering in the way Pain of Truth have always been. I don't think "Unforgiven" is an instant classic, but I don't hear what there is to hate about it.

Aeiou - Jesse Ward

I've been thinking about emo more than usual lately. Partially because I just read Andrew Sacher's great emo revival book – which you should absolutely pre-order – and partially because I'm seeing the rapidly rising young emo band First Day Back tonight (review coming next week). And partially because Caden (the boy did it again, folks) sent me this new emo band Aeiou earlier this week, and they feel destined to become at least temporarily important to the booming return of 90s-style emo in the underground. My good friend Hugo Reyes told me he gets irked when people use the phrase "sixth-wave emo," but I kind of think that's what's happening right now, and Aeiou are a part of it.

The contentiously titled "fifth wave" that was codified during COVID lockdown (Origami Angel, Home Is Where, Glass Beach, etc.) is, both sonically and culturally, from a distinctly different generation than bands like First Day Back, gapyear, Febuary, The Ritornello Form, and now Aeiou. The NYC band boasts members of the buzzy Brooklyn groups Holidays In United States and Cash Only Tony's, and their debut EP, Jesse Ward, is a grab-bag of blown-out and battered songs that weave together SDRE-esque emo explosions, chug-laden screamo contortions, early 2000s Long Island pop-punk wails, and more lo-fi shoegaze haziness than this style of music would've been coated in if it came out 15 years ago.

I'll surely have more to say on this topic after tonight's sold-out First Day Back show, but this wave of emo at once feels like deja vu and also like something totally different than the emo era I grew up with. Aeiou are directly imitating the 90s greats, but in a slightly different way than how millennial revivalists like Snowing and You Blew It! were doing it. I don't think I'm presently able to articulate exactly what it is that makes Aeiou sound distinctly 2026 instead of 2010. The reference points are very similar and the feeling they're aiming to evoke is the same. Maybe it's because Aeiou are a little more comfortable pulling from sounds that aren't "supposed" to be part of the "90s emo" palette. Or maybe it's just that a copy of a copy is still its own unique document.

klurax - "let it sink in"

I'm intrigued by this artist named klurax. The LA singer-producer has actually been dropping music for a few years now, but she landed on my radar with her June single "about you," a sensitive and dreamy pop song with an understatedly giant hook. The bass and drums on that tune have the ASMR-like intimacy that's quickly becoming standard in a post-ear underground, but klurax is a little more subtle and a lot less trendily esoteric than other artists in her region of pop's substrata. Her new single "let it sink in" isn't quite as sticky as "about you," but I like the glittery drum 'n' bass beat and the way the chorus stutters violently like an airplane battling turbulence. I think there's something special brewing here.

DJ Nate - Da Trak Genious

It's been a footwork summer for me. The genre's canonical compilation, Bangs and Works, Vol. 1, has been a go-to choice of mine for the last few months, and this week I became stuck on DJ Nate's equally crucial 2010 debut, Da Trak Genious. As a music journalist tuned into the underground, I'm supposed to project an aura of encyclopedic authority about everything I cover. However, sometimes it's a fun and humbling exercise to openly admit my blind spots while I casually explore a genre that I barely even know the basics of. The Chicago-native offshoot of house music initially blew up in the early 2010s when I was a teenager crowdsurfing at Warped Tour. I eventually found my way into footwork through RP Boo's 2023 comp, Legacy Volume 2, and now I'm comfortable enough to take a few more steps inside.

I've realized – perhaps unsurprisingly – that I'm most partial to footwork that's hostile and boisterous. Some of DJ Nate's sample-heavy songs are built with looped fragments of sentimental pop and R&B tracks, and I like those ones, too. But I really enjoy songs like "Footwurk Homicide," where fat horns thwomp with elephantine heaviness and the cyclical vocal is a violent threat that sounds less idle with each go-around: "I'll murder any n**** that steps in the circle." Another stunner is "Hatas Our Motivation," where the noir-like synth is attacked by metallic snares and the titular refrain is repeated so many times that it becomes more mantra than music. The sturdy simplicity, the elliptical repetition, the eerie starkness, and the competitive spirit of footwork – a genre, like heavy hardcore, that's made to soundtrack dancefloor battles – is what draws me to it. And at this point, I'm never leaving.

Nehemiah - The Asphyxiation Process

Ever since I saw Nehemiah earlier this month, I haven't taken their sole 2003 album out of my rotation. The Minneapolis group are one of many B or C-tier (in terms of popularity, not quality) metalcore bands who've recently reunited to great fanfare among people who were in pre-school when they first broke up. I initially heard them a few years ago when I was deep-diving underrated metalcore bands from the genre's nascent years, but they didn't stick out to me until I experienced their unexpectedly bulletproof live performance and utterly bonkers crowd response. They're more overtly moshy than other melodeath-inspired 'coreman of their time – Prayer for Cleansing, Undying, The Black Dahlia Murder – but still have a tendency to write long, winding songs that are littered with chewy riffs.

I'd put them in the same category as early It Dies Today and then obviously Balmora, whose initial stuff was clearly inspired by Nehemiah's blend of Gothenburg-ian guitarwork and punishing breakdowns. The first song on The Asphyxiation Process, "Dead in the Wake," is needlessly almost seven minutes long, and basically sounds like two songs stuck together. But I kind of like that about it. I love metalcore when it's less thought-out, preened, and self-conscious of what it's trying to be. These songs have a slight amateurish quality to them without ever sounding sloppy, and the breakdowns are relentless in a way that makes Nehemiah slot perfectly into today's metalcore landscape. I already can't wait to see them again.

Chasing Down

Caden Clinton
of
Pool Kids

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

When I launched the weekly Chasing Down series over a year ago, my initial intention was to interview a blend of artists and friends. It hasn't exactly panned out that way (probably for the best, to be honest), but this week I'm staying true to the initial idea and asking my friend some questions. Caden Clinton is the drummer of Pool Kids, a very good fifth-wave emo band who are signed to Epitaph Records. He's played drums in many other groups over the years, and also builds and sells his own custom drums to touring musicians all over the world. He's also my roommate, my most loyal show buddy, and someone I've spent endless hours discussing music minutia with.

Not all professional musicians are actually all that interested in listening to new music. In fact, many of the musicians I've interviewed over the years have told me that they specifically don't go out of their way to discover new bands so that their own expression remains untainted by influence. Or because they're simply not curious about what's happening with the youth. Caden is not that kind of musician. He sends me new music he finds every single day and is tirelessly committed to keeping up with the bleeding edge of metalcore, emo, indie, rap, and much more. For this week's Chasing Down Q&A, I asked him about his methods of discovery, his favorite trends in music right now, the best live band he's seen this year, and much more.

Read the full interview below – and the 60-plus others in the archive, with a new one added each week.