Silverstein: Misery Made Me 2023

The Ontario, Canada-bred rockers have risen from their underground roots to the top of the emo and post-hardcore genre after two decades in the industry.” – Billboard

Silverstein enters their 25th year with two full-length albums set for 2025. The band that NME calls “legendary,” and Loudwire placed among the Most Prolific Rock & Metal Artists of the 21st Century, continues to innovate and inspire on forward-thinking records and at crowd-embracing live shows.

Sequestering away together in a remote desert was such a revelation for Shane Told (vocals), Paul Koehler (drums), Josh Bradford (guitar), Billy Hamilton (bass), and Paul Marc Rousseau (guitar) that they returned with their best work yet: the stunning and invigorating Antibloom and Pink Moon.

The band made Antibloom and Pink Moon at Fireside Sound, a recording studio and filming location on 35 private acres in Joshua Tree, California. The immersive desert area has offered life-affirming creative fire to iconic troubadours like Gram Parsons, Queens Of The Stone Age, and now Silverstein.

They arrived in Joshua Tree with 25 completed demos and chose their 16 favorites. Koehler suggested splitting the music into two albums and turning 2025 into a year-long celebration. This allows listeners the space to absorb and connect with the songs, like “Mercy Mercy” (a vicious takedown of sadomasochistic doom-scrolling), the anxiety-examining “Don’t Let Me Get Too Low,” and “Cherry Coke” (which began with a melody from Bradford) from Antibloom, before digging into Pink Moon.

Rousseau and Told composed the majority of the music for the diverse pair of records. Cassadee Pope and Dayseeker’s Rory Rodriguez feature on “Autopilot” and “Drain the Blood,” respectively, both found on Pink Moon.

Now a Las Vegas, Nevada resident, Told expanded his personal process beyond his bedroom, traveling to Los Angeles for a series of writing trips with outside collaborators for a fresh perspective. Those included Sam Guaiana, Austin Coupe, and Josh Landry (who contributed to Antibloom’s “Skin & Bones”), as well as John Lundin, Lucky West, Kevin Thrasher, and Curtis Peoples.

“When you’ve done 11 albums, it can become harder to write without repeating yourself,” Told says. “This was a cool way to shake it up. Many of these writers are younger than me; some grew up on our band. I made new friends and developed new ideas without getting stuck on songs. It kicked my ass a little bit and gave me some new confidence, having that feedback and exchange about my songs.”

Guaiana, a Toronto native now based in Los Angeles who previously worked on A Beautiful Place to Drown and Misery Made Me, produced, engineered, and mixed the new songs.

As the group explained in a collective statement, the Antibloom title reflects the desert’s harsh nature, while Pink Moon conjures its simultaneous beauty. Toward the end of the recording process, the band briefly stepped outside together to experience one such pink moon.

“Five Canadians went to Joshua Tree for five weeks and made a cool double album greatly inspired by a magical place,” the drummer says. “It was the first time we’d ventured away in years, and it opened up something special.

Dayseeker is a 4-piece Rock/Metal band from Southern California formed in 2012. They are signed with Spinefarm Records, a subsidiary of Universal Music Group. On December 15, 2016, the band announced their departure from InVogue Records and that they had signed with Spinefarm Records. Shortly after, they announced a US tour with headliner Silent Planet, along with Ghost Key and Hail the Sun, which began in February 2017. A year after the release of Origin, Dayseeker announced a new full-length album set to release in 2017. The album, Dreaming Is Sinking / Waking Is Rising, was released by Spinefarm on July 14, 2017. 

Since the release of Dreaming Is Sinking / Waking Is Rising the band has been touring relentlessly countrywide and building a strong profile. The record sold just shy of 2,000 copies in their first week, earning them some impressive debut charting positions amongst hard rock and new artists. In Summer 2017, they embarked on a tour with The Color Morale and The Plot In You. Followed by that tour, they supported a tour with Oceans Ate Alaska and with Ice Nine Kills to close out their year. 

Spinefarm will be releasing a deluxe version of Dreaming Is Sinking / Waking Is Rising in 2018 featuring some stripped down versions of a few tracks and an additional cover track. Catch Dayseeker this summer performing on the Mutant stage on the Vans Warped Tour. 

Take a deep breath before you listen to The Romance Of Affliction. You’re going to need it. The second full-length by San Diego’s SeeYouSpaceCowboy, it’s a brutal musical and emotional assault on the senses. It’s the sound of total collapse, of darkness closing in, of trying to escape – through drugs, through death, through whatever means necessary – from the horrors of existence. Not just metaphorically, either. Two weeks after the band finished recording it, frontwoman Connie Sgarbossa nearly died from a drug overdose. It was, she admits, a kind of physical manifestation of everything the album’s 13 songs are about.
“Writing music is cathartic to me,” she says. “Getting things on paper is the only way I know how to deal with stuff. So to have that happen two weeks later almost backed up why I wrote the album – it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. There’s a line on this album that goes ‘I think I took too much/Stop breathing’, and that’s literally what happened to me. It reinforced that  I wrote the album that I needed to write.”
The song she’s talking about is “…And My Faded Reflection In Your Eyes”, a coruscating battle of brutal breakdowns, soaring melodies and angular riffs. It lasts for just over three minutes, but in that time lives are lost and saved, and galaxies formed through the prism of the lyrics’ internal anguish. It’s not just on that song that Connie is so blunt, but on all of them. Yet while her words are as cerebral and intelligent as ever – full of poetic imagery, literary conceits and philosophical concepts – she made the conscious effort to differentiate her approach compared to past efforts.
“Old SpaceCowboy was so masturbatory and flowery,” smirks Connie. “It was like ‘Look how clever I can be’ and no-one really got what the fuck I was saying. I wanted to find a sweet spot in the middle where they were expressing my feelings, but also kind of clever at the same time. I wanted to challenge myself.”
This time, then, Connie poured more of herself, her emotions, her feelings, into these songs than she ever had since the band – completed, on this record, by Connie’s brother Ethan (guitar/vocals), Taylor Allen (bass/vocals) and AJ Tartol (drums) – first formed in 2016. Initially, the idea was for this record to be a response to the band’s 2019 debut, The Correlation Between Entrance And Exit Wounds, a record heavily inspired by the suicide of Connie’s then-partner Natalie Margaret Garrett, but Connie soon realized that wasn’t the record she needed to make.
“I wanted Correlations to be the entrance wounds, because that was a really dark time in my life,” she explains. “And then this record would be the exit wounds, and would be about healing. But when I sat down to think about it, I realized that I haven’t really gotten that much better. So I decided I wanted to write an album about what stuff’s really like – what it means to use people, to use sex and connections and drugs to fill voids in your life, what it means to be 25 and be diagnosed as bipolar, what it means to be an addict in love with an addict. Because it’s not some romantic bohemian thing like it is in the movies. It’s gnarly. I’m not writing about razorblades and roses and this is my nicely-lit suicide attempt – this is me taking too many drugs and hoping I’d stop breathing.”

In facing those stark realities, Connie decided she didn’t want to write songs that glossed over the truth. Because even though she admits to being more stable than before, things still weren’t right.
“I didn’t want to write an album that was like ‘Hey, everything’s okay!’” she continues. “A big theme is what it means to be in love while also dealing with all these terrible things. But I got home and after two weeks I almost died of an overdose. And I felt like it was important to let people know that yeah, I’m writing this record, but that this shit’s also very real. This is my life. It’s not just the album I’m going to write about things that seem gnarly but that I don’t really experience. This is actually what happened – I was an asshole, I did use these people, I did use sex to fill voids in my life. I was doing anything I could to run away from my feelings, doing all the drugs I could, using all the people I could. I wanted to be as honest as possible and write  about things I feel metalcore bands don’t write about.”

That brutal, unflinching honesty isn’t just conveyed with Connie’s intensely personal lyrics, but through the intensely visceral songs that bring those raw emotions to life. Indeed, the music is a physical manifestation of the existential tug of war played out in these songs – the push and pull between existence and non-existence, the torment of loss, the rush and exhilaration and self-destructive devastation of addiction – and everything in-between. Whether the blisteringly erratic tumult of opener “Life As A Soap Opera Plot, 26 Years Running” – which features Every Time I Die’s Keith Buckley – or the confused duality of “With Arms That Bind And Lips That Lock”, the wild, craven and careening existential torment of “Ouroboros As An Overused Metaphor” or the desperate, suppurating urgency of “Melodrama Between Two Entirely Bored Individuals”, each song its own unpredictable, chaotic journey through darkness and pain, all linked together by the universe they’re part of.
 
Previously, SeeYouSpaceCowboy had only written material in the short breaks between tours. This time, the band were able to spend much more time on these songs, to really shape the music into embodiment and physical manifestation of their subject matter.
“The amount of preparation we did for this record was crazy compared to all the other stuff we’ve done,” says Ethan. “We spent a year and some change just writing and writing and writing. I did a lot of it initially. I wrote a lot of songs and I would bring them to the band and we’d change them and mix them up, make revisions. We demoed out all the vocals, did revisions and then went into pre-production. It was a much more collaborative process than we’ve ever done before, but that’s what needed to happen. It makes it much more interesting than if it was just one person writing it.”
 
Produced by Knocked Loose guitarist Isaac Hale, The Romance Of Affliction stands as the quintessential SeeYouSpaceCowboy record. It’s violent and vicious, harrowing but oddly comforting, bleak yet beautiful. It’s a complex and compelling mix of genres that defies categorization and which truly places the band in a world of their own. And – despite the sorrowful despair that flows through it from beginning to end – it’s also got that trademark sass that has defined the band from the start.
“With Correlations,” says Connie, “we lost a lot of the weirdness and the sassiness and the chaotic aspect of everything, but I feel that was what made SpaceCowboy SpaceCowboy. When we were writing this album, we said that we wanted to bring that back, because it’s something that should never have been lost. That is SpaceCowboy. We do weird shit and we should never have done away with that.”
“It’s definitely an album of experimentation,” adds Ethan. “The idea behind it was really to just throw everything we want to do in a blender and make it work.”
 
That’s something borne out in the eclectic guests who appear on the record. In addition to Keith Buckley, hip-hop artist Shaolin G (who also fronts rap/metal crossover act UnityTX) features on “Sharpen What You Can”, Underøath’s Aaron Gillespie on “Intersecting Storylines To The Same Tragedy” and – following a brief, beautiful, piano-based interlude written by former bassist Tim Moreno (who rejoined the band after this album was finished) – If I Die First appear on title and closing track. A beautiful, portentous tune, it’s a song that encapsulates the emotions of the entire record and the events that both preceded and followed it.
“It’s a song we wrote entirely with Isaac,” says Ethan. “I just remember getting to the fade out part of it and being like, ‘This is how I want the album to end. This is how it needs to end.’”
“On most somber, sad part of the record,” adds Connie with a wry smile. “But that mirrors perfectly that shit’s not better. That song is the title track because it’s literally about what it’s like to be an addict in love with an addict. It mirrors life perfectly because my girlfriend’s the one who found me on the couch dying. It’s a song that addresses my current situation but also talks about my past, and it pulled everything together into perspective as I was writing it. I listen to it now and it ties into part of the reason why I became an addict, which was dealing with Natalie’s death, as well as my current situation, and that’s how I wanted this journey to end. It’s not a good resolution and it’s not a happy ending, but it’s also not just saying ‘Yeah, I fucking blew my brains out the next day.’”
 

One Step Closer has always believed that hardcore is limitless. On All You Embrace, the band puts that theory into practice. Every release from the Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania band has seen them exploring the sonic overlaps of hardcore, emo, and ‘90s alternative rock without an iota of self-consciousness, or pretension, creeping into the mix. The band’s latest is a collection of 11 songs that show One Step Closer reaching for something deeply honest and, as always, authentic.

With founding members Ryan Savitski (vocals) and Ross Thompson (guitar) at the helm of One Step Closer, alongside newest addition Colman O’Brien (guitar), the three were able to fearlessly guide One Step Closer in new directions. Taken in full, All You Embrace is the sound of One Step Closer honoring their past while building a future that looks more open, more creative, and more expansive than anything the band has done before.