Touché Amoré

For more than a decade, L.A. phenoms Touché Amoré have been a driving force as vanguards of the contemporary hardcore scene. Over the years, and across their discography, the band has probed and navigated anxiety, isolation, illness, and grief. Now a bedrock of post-hardcore, Touché Amoré have never stopped looking forward. Their latest work, the deeply-felt Spiral in a Straight Line, continues on the trajectory of innovation, transformation, and reflection, translating lived experiences into a broadly resonant record that continues to explore new sonic territory for the band. It’s a reckoning with monumental change — an evocative result of internal and external turbulence.

The band’s second time working with renowned — and notorious, lore-ridden — producer Ross Robinson (At the Drive-In, Slipknot, Glassjaw), Spiral in a Straight Line revels in discomfort. This ongoing collaboration marks a new dimension of complexity as Touché Amoré further push the boundaries of their sound while delving further into their emotional core. A deft, dynamic creative unit at this stage in their storied career, the band wields intimacy with steady hands and exhibits new mastery over their relentlessly expressive sonics. As ever, they are in equal measure deliberate and impassioned.

An unraveling of tangled wires — ropes, threads, knots of all kinds — occurs here, in the effort of perspective otherwise not found. The spiral is interiority caught in a loop of anxiety, its straight line is the attempt to keep composure when all feels as though it is falling apart. It’s intensely personal. And yet a universal conceit: What happens when you’re trying to keep it together for appearances’ sake, even when you feel you’re coming undone at the seams.

Principal lyricist Jeremy Bolm, guitarists Nick Steinhardt and Clayton Stevens, bassist Tyler Kirby, and drummer Elliot Babin, each came to the practice space and studio with vastly different evolutions at play. In the process of crafting Spiral in a Straight Line, they melded — in the same, but different, way Touché Amoré have for their now over a decade-long stint. There was something in the air the whole crew tapped into, during the second rainiest season on record in LA. The songs flowed more freely, they delved deeper than ever. With a new level of intimacy in Steinhardt’s home practice space combined with the return to Robinson’s mining of emotion, Touché Amoré reach a tier of fervency that marks an ecstatic turn in the band’s pages.

“As I fixate on the road ahead It just winds and winds and winds and winds,” Bolm wails in the outro of the record’s lead track, “Nobodys” — whose narrator is a “character” wishing to chalk it all up to performance, who proclaims that sometimes life just doesn’t make any sense at all. It’s the first time in the band’s history that Bolm takes on these twisting lyrical and vocal traits, an apt mirroring of the album’s thematic whole.

These vocal spirals are as intentional as the visuals constructed for Spiral in a Straight Line, helmed by Steinhardt. The group’s seasoned art director, Steinhardt has been conceiving graphics for Touché Amoré’s tenure, based on Bolm’s lyrics as well as the sonic palette of each album. It’s greener this time around: a fresh start, perhaps, a space that considers the recent past and leaves it behind at the same time. And it’s in motion — each piece in turn referring to the scroll-like shape of a film reel and its unfurling. The language of film, its simultaneous flatness and depth, linear yet round, wound into itself.

On marquee track “Hal Ashby” is where these ideas converge most tightly. A nod to the director of Being There and Harold and Maude, the song is inspired by Ashby’s misunderstood characters; the tragedy of miscommunication, the tricks you play on yourself to convince you you’re right when, maybe, there’s some big thing you’re missing. A “rose-tinted view,” a “fools’ errand,” a “red herring.” The song itself is romantic, sonically and lyrically, in the way it feels to see things in a certain light, and then be course corrected — as Bolm sings — recalibrated by a force out of your control.

What it takes to change is often not what you saw in your toolbelt. Sometimes, suddenly, everything is unfamiliar. A longtime favorite song of Bolm’s was following him, again — Sebadoh’s “Brand New Love.” It’s a song about finding love in an unexpected place. And Bolm found that the chorus of this Sebadoh song from 1990 fit perfectly over the outro of a song he was writing, which became “Subversion.” Bolm, in his words, “understood the brazen request” and asked Lou Barlow if he might sing over it — and he did. The languid, melancholic song questions progress, the very concept of past and future, all while listening to Barlow’s song playing as Bolm touches down in Adelaide. And then there’s Barlow on the outro, his words of new love complicating it all.

Julien Baker, now based in LA, joined the band in the studio for the first time, after two previous features. Baker’s voice, gentle as a companion to Bolm’s, sings of catching fire and burning brighter, on album closer “Goodbye For Now.” The two harmonize — about trying to “Find new ways to not fall away,” self-forgiveness, washing away of guilt.

“Another day repeats,” goes “Mezzanine,” Spiral in a Straight Line’s central and most pummeling track. Here, everything swirls up and burns out at once, a thesis on what it means to try to survive the normalcy and strangeness of entering a life that is both new and not new. “A tire fire happening internally,” Bolm howls. Each thread of the record coils up in this idea: going through routines but in thin air; keeping up through raindrops; multiplying demons and fence-sitting; dead of new days; a spiral in a straight line; will I get used to this?

Linear and circular at the same time, Spiral in a Straight Line is concerned with the fear and trepidation that accompanies shifts out of one’s control. The anxiety of a circle broken: how you figure your way out.