New Jersey rock band Can’t Swim have released new single No Backbone.
“One of my favourite songwriters ever said “a good tune should take 30 minutes to write” and No Backbone certainly falls into that category. Once we finished it we went back a few times to see if we should add a part or bring more instrumentation/layers to the mix but whatever we did seemed to take away from the song rather than add to it. As time goes on I think as a band we are more and more drawn to do what excites us creatively in that moment and to do things we haven’t done before. I’m not saying this song is reinventing the wheel by any means but having a tune that feels raw and stripped down with incredibly literal lyrics (haha) is something that feels new and fresh for us to put out. All Killer No Filler as Elton John once said”
Chris LoPorto
Can’t Swim will also embark on a co-headline North American tour with Belmont starting this May.
“…the kind of melodic, hard-hitting, no-bullsh*t indie rock that has become Cloud Nothings’ calling card — a sound that has helped them endure through several hype cycles to become one of the most consistently rewarding bands in their scene.” – Stereogum
“Whenever there’s a new Cloud Nothings record, you can rest assured that it will be great.” – Uproxx
“…at their most anthemic.” – BrooklynVegan
“The band’s energy level never slackens throughout Final Summer, and the entirety of the record’s half-hour run time sounds massive…” – FLOOD Magazine
Cloud Nothings‘ highly anticipated new album, Final Summer, is out now from Pure Noise Records! The record has already garnered attention from the likes of Pitchfork, NPR, Stereogum, Rolling Stone, Paste, BrooklynVegan, Uproxx, FLOOD Magazine, and more, and continues the band’s nearly 15 year streak of unimpeachably fantastic guitar rock music.
Final Summer is the kind of album that’s so assured, so instantly satisfying, that it forces you to pause and realize you’re listening to one of the great American rock bands in their prime. Now listeners can hear the record in full and experience the inventive riffing, effortless hooks, and earthshaking guitar tones that prove exactly why every Cloud Nothings release is downright essential. To celebrate, the band have shared their new music video for Final Summer‘s triumphant closer, Common Mistake.
Cloud Nothings – made up of vocalist/guitarist Dylan Baldi, drummer Jayson Gerycz and bassist Chris Brown – have evolved from scrappy lofi upstarts into a guitar music institution, churning out incredible songs at a rate and level of quality that few can compare to. Recorded with Jeff Zeigler (Kurt Vile, The War On Drugs, Torres, Purling Hiss), mixed by Sarah Tudzin (boygenius, Tim Heidecker, Pom Pom Squad), and mastered by Jack Callahan (Ryley Walker, Merchandise, Wolf Eyes), Final Summer offers their finest set of songs to date, perfectly capturing the mix of melody and noise that makes Cloud Nothings so special. Clocking in at a lean 29 minutes, the album is bursting with the unbridled joy that comes from playing guitars and drums loudly. This is not the work of a scrappy new band cramming all of their ideas into a debut album or grizzled veterans grinding through another release: it’s one of the tightest and most invigorating rock bands active today, driven to make the best version of themselves.
Cloud Nothings will be touring extensively in support of Final Summer, starting with a lengthy North American headlining tour in May.
ABOUT CLOUD NOTHINGS: Some bands never miss. This rare breed consistently puts out great records every couple years, avoiding the lengthy hiatuses or egregious sonic missteps that often come with achieving longevity. It’s an often unsung reliability, as few realize how truly remarkable it is to put art into the world at this rate without letting the quality slip. For nearly 15 years, Cloud Nothings have continued to hit the target, steadily becoming a part of the fabric of modern indie rock as we know it with a run of fantastic albums. This streak continues unabated with their latest full-length, Final Summer–an album that’s so assured, so instantly satisfying, that it forces you to pause and realize you’re listening to one of the great American rock bands in their prime.
Formed in 2009 by guitarist/vocalist Dylan Baldi, Cloud Nothings evolved over the years from a one-man lo-fi project into a finely tuned unit also composed of drummer Jayson Gerycz and bassist Chris Brown. Cloud Nothings, over so many years and so many records (nine or ten “depending on how you look at it,” laughs Baldi), have existed long enough to witness all sorts of musical moments come and go, but the secret to their endurance isn’t about savvily navigating trends. “We’ve just never felt inclined to stop,”Baldi explains. “It’s not like this makes us millions of dollars, but it’s a great gig, it’s what we love to do.” Gerycz adds, “It’s just still so fun every time we do it, every time we go get in the basement and start writing.”
And it shows. Recorded with Jeff Zeigler (Kurt Vile, The War On Drugs, Torres, Purling Hiss), mixed by Sarah Tudzin (boygenius, Tim Hiedecker, Pom Pom Squad), and mastered by Jack Callahan (Ryley Walker, Merchandise, Wolf Eyes), Final Summer is bursting with the unbridled joy that only comes from playing guitars and drums loudly. This is not the work of a scrappy new band cramming all of their ideas into a debut album or grizzled veterans grinding through another release: it’s one of the tightest and most invigorating rock bands active today, driven to make the best version of themselves. “I just like making things,” says Baldi. “I love having something that I’ve made by the end of the day, even if it’s just one song. It’s like proof that my day happened. I’m just always trying to refine the thing we do, which is to make songs that take you from one place to another.”
Very few bands take listeners on that kind of journey within a hooky rock song as effectively as Cloud Nothings, and the album’s opening title track proves exactly why. A wash of crackling synths sets the scene before the band roars to life with a cutting riff and Gerycz’s driving beat. From there, it’s layer after layer of interlocking melodies and guitar lines, all rising action while Baldi lays out the album’s overarching lyrical ideas. “It’s about feeling alright in the moment,”Baldi says. “A lot of these songs sort of ended up being about getting by or trying to keep improving despite everything.”
His lyrics often take on a mantra-like quality, using repetition and a one-of-a-kind delivery to dig something deeper out of observations about the mundane or frustrating parts of life. On early Final Summer standout I’d Get Along, Baldi repeats “if something would happen with me…” over and over, each time adding to the tension before the track’s truly massive chorus explodes with a cacophony of fuzzed-out guitars and a howling “I’d get along.” Throughout the record, Cloud Nothings strike their trademark balance of inventiveness and accessibility, with every track full of hooks but also the kinds of details and twists that reward repeat listens. The Golden Halo feels like a two-minute-long chorus, hook after hook careening forward with a motorik beat and ever-growing sea of voices, while elsewhere songs like Mouse Policy or Running Through The Campus take very literal ideas and spin them into something else through walls of thick bass and thunderous distortion.
On Final Summer closer Common Mistake, Baldi sings, “This is your life, it’s a common mistake. We’ll be alright, just give more than you take.” It’s the kind of deceptively direct lyric that he excels at, a clear and real sentiment filtered through a melody that’s stuck in your head before the end of the first chorus. The line could almost be an accidental mission statement for the band itself: a group that creates with a workman-like commitment, providing listeners with something authentic and artful at an unflinching pace. Cloud Nothings don’t miss, and you won’t want to miss them either.
“…SeeYouSpaceCowboy never fail to deliver…this is a killer release from a killer young band and if SeeYouSpaceCowboy are not on your radar yet, rest assured, they will be soon!” – Everblack Media
“Coup de Grâce presents a captivating musical experience, and really is a great album…it’s a thoroughly enjoyable listen that showcases the band’s versatility and creativity.” – The AU Review
“This is so fun…man, emo is not dead!” – The Break Down With Nath & Johnny
“…It’s a hell of a ride and one that is fuelled by boundless energy, light and shade” – The Soundcheck
San Diego, CA – Post hardcore band SeeYouSpaceCowboy have pulled back the curtains on their highly anticipated new album Coup De Grâce. With each new single the band has a welcomed listeners into a neo-noir world of their own creation, culminating in a brand new music video for Lubricant Like Kerosene (ft. Kim Dracula).
“This album was a chance for us to refine some of the melodic elements we had recently introduced to the band while also playing around with all things and bringing back reinvented version of past parts of our identity,” shares frontwoman Connie Sgarbossa. “The hope is that we made something that mixes the innate emotion of post hardcore with the cathartic essence of dancing and allure of cabaret/burlesque in a package reflecting the tale of a city on fire and it’s all to tragic individuals and their indulgence and woes.”
SeeYouSpaceCowboy recently hit the road for their North American tour with Better Lovers, Foreign Hands, and Greyhaven. The tour kicked off earlier this week in Indianapolis, with stops to follow in Albuquerque, San Diego, Seattle, Minneapolis, and more. SeeYouSpaceCowboy will also be performing at this year’s Sound and Fury Festival in Los Angeles this July.
01. Allow Us To Set The Scene 02. Subtle Whispers To Take Your Breath Away 03. And The Two Slipped Into Shadows 04. Red Wine And Discontent 05. Lubricant Like Kerosene (ft. Kim Dracula) 06. Respite For A Tragic Tale (ft. iRis.EXE) 07. Silhouettes In Motion 08. To The Dance Floor For Shelter (ft. Courtney Laplante) 09. Rhythm And Rapture (ft. nothing,nowhere.) 10. Sister With A Gun 11. Chewing The Scenery 12. Curtain Call
ABOUT SEEYOUSPACECOWBOY: Every single song SeeYouSpaceCowboy have released since forming in 2016 has been deeply rooted in the life experience and trauma of frontwoman Connie Sgarbossa. Whether that’s existential anguish, substance addiction or suicidal ideation (and attempts), Sgarbossa has never been afraid to detail her pain and torment in excruciating detail. She holds nothing back, and combined with the band’s intensely dark (and darkly intense) blend of sasscore, punk, mathcore and metalcore, it’s always made for profound and devastating listening. Coup De Grâce is no exception to that rule. The band’s third album, it follows on from 2019’s The Correlation Between Entrance And Exit Wounds and 2021’s The Romance Of Affliction. But unlike those two records, which were unadulterated, no-holds-barred accounts of her life at the time, Coup De Grâce takes a different approach to its lyrics. Rather than Sgarbossa baring her most private and innermost thoughts for all to hear, on these 12 songs they’re funneled through the lives of fictional characters within a noir-inspired world of the singer’s invention.
It makes sense, then, that the record begins with something utterly unlike anything the band has ever made before: a sax-laden, smoky, late night smooth jazz ballad. It immediately draws the listener back to a time and place that exists decades in the past, a Moulin Rouge-esque club that’s not quite in the real world—and it’s within that parallel decadent and dystopian universe, and its various buildings, that everything then plays out. That ‘everything’ is just as personal as anything the band — completed by Connie’s brother Ethan Sgarbossa (guitar/vocals), Taylor Allen (bass/vocals), Tim Moreno (guitar) and AJ Tartol (drums) — have ever released, but it manifests itself across Coup De Grâce’s 12 songs in an entirely different way than before. And with valid reason, too.
“The record started as a visual idea,” explains Sgarbossa, “because when it came to lyrics, I didn’t know what the fuck to write at first. I’m not a drug addict junkie anymore, so I’m not going to write another album like The Romance Of Affliction — I can’t, and I don’t want to. So my mind wandered to things that I love, like Frank Miller’s Sin City graphic novels, where there are all these stories interlaced within a city. That led me to think about noir and neo-noir, and then pulp comics and novels from the ’40s and ’50s, which started to make it all come together lyrically and thematically, where each different song can be a different tale of the city.”
After the first minute and a bit of that opening song, however, the theatrics stop, their fuzzy, nostalgic warmth shattered by blast beats and screams, pulverizing guitars and exasperated spoken word, as the band deliver the kind of chaotic, violent noise they’re known for. And yet, as that gives way to second song Subtle Whispers To Take Your Breath Away, its ravaged, ferocious edges also reveal a new and surprising development in the band’s sound—a more catchy and accessible sense of melody influenced by what Sgarbossa terms “dancier indie-rock” influences like Bloc Party, Foals and Two Door Cinema Club. That came, she says, after she’d convinced, with some difficulty, the band to go with her proposed visual aesthetics for the record.
Recorded by Matt Squire at Mixwave Studios, Coup De Grâce is an album in the truest sense of the word. Wholeheartedly ambitious, it’s a graphic novel in musical form that not only succeeds in creating its own deliciously dark, noir universe, but one whose characters truly inhabit the world that SeeYouSpaceCowboy have invented for them. In fact, listening to it is more akin to watching it all unfold onstage. That’s partly due to the narration of Iris.EXE (who also appears on Respite For A Tragic Tale, a kind of intermission in the album’s middle), but also to the masterful execution of these songs.
Of course, it’s nothing new for the band to switch up their sound—they do that with every record — but the they’ve taken it to the next level with this one. And just as The Romance Of Affliction proved that art doesn’t always soothe suffering — Sgarbossa attempted to take her life two weeks after finishing that record — so Coup De Grâce proves that you don’t necessarily need to suffer to make great art. The singer is clean now and in a much better place than ever, but her band have also created the most ambitious, epic and accomplished album of its career.
“I hope,” she says, “that people can look at this as a complete expression—not just ‘Oh, this song has a good breakdown’, but at the whole story, the whole setting, the visuals of it all and the way the music all ties in. I hope they see the creativity of that and the risk we’ve taken by embedding Cowboy with more weirdo outside influences that you usually wouldn’t see from a band like us. It’s like a full, unified creative venture, and something we put a lot of work into, so I hope they appreciate the weirdness of it. I feel like a lot of times people hear clean singing and more melody from a heavy band and think they’re selling out. But no — we’re actually technically weirder on this record than we’ve ever been.”
With that, it’s time to put your best shoes on. You’re going to need them as you dance inside the fire.
