Album Review: Spiral in a Straight Line by Touché Amoré

You won't catch these SoCal punks on next year's Warped Tour, that's for damn sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if they end up playing another thousand shows. Their lineup hasn't changed since 2010, a superhuman feat for any hardcore band, though their new album came at a time when they were just trying to keep it together. Spiral in a Straight Line does pull them in different directions, but as always, the results remain remarkably consistent.

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discomfortzone If any band has earned their right to a little bit of autopilot as a treat, it's Touché Amoré. When three excellently sad hardcore records led to the devastating Stage Four in the mid-2010s, it felt like there was little the band could still say or do to truly add to their achievements. 2020's Lament confirmed this ever so slightly: while undeniably good, the album felt like it was trying its hand at more expansive songwriting for the sake of it, rather than out of necessity.

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Following up 2020's Lament, Spiral is a showcase of the band's portfolio of sounds, which play out across the entire album. The lead riff on opener "Nobody's" is reminiscent of the post-hardcore bands of the early 2010s, like mewithoutYou and Title Fight, but with vocalist Jeremy Bolm's familiar blend of rasp and melody. Echoing the ruminations from Stage Four, in which he explored grieving thoroughly (specifically in relation to the loss of his mother to cancer), Bolm understands the importance of persistence in the face of adversity, which is itself, persistent; "We'll grieve in a forward direction / Neck and neck, and side by side / As I fixate on the road ahead / It just winds, and winds and winds.

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Touché Amore‘s run as one of melodic hardcore’s top bands has lasted over a decade. With every release, they have refined their sound a little more, incorporating more and more indie into their hardcore. They stand out from the scene as a group known for musical restlessness and ….

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"I'm bad at taking photos of the people I love the most," rasps Jeremy Bolm on 'This Routine', "I just think they'll always be there, when we all know that they won't. " It's a telltale sign of one of the many spirals referenced in Touché Amoré's sixth studio album, a record that encapsulates a sonic whirlwind of anger, angst, loss and melancholia thematically in keeping with their recent output, although less singular than before. Its sound stretches the edges of the melody-driven hardcore the band have owned, at times fully embracing the minimalism of scene contemporaries La Dispute or the scuzzy rock of the Lou Barlow-featuring 'Subversion'.

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