Pardon me for being so blunt, but the new Touché Amoré is fucking awesome. Not only does this album have their longest song to date (3:30) and show immense growth / evolution from their last album, but I’m going to put my stake in the ground and call it the hardcore album of the year. And no it is not a typo that I called them a hardcore band and not a post-hardcore band.
For the record I hate the term post-hardcore. I know that music historians, record labels, and obsessive compulsive music geeks have a defined segment of time in American music where hardcore was at it’s peak and blah blah blah, but I feel like it’s a bullshit term. It’s not like hardcore bands just stopped creating music, that on a specific day they packed up their mosh pits and went home and hardcore stopped existing. Call me simple, but if it sounds like hardcore, feels like hardcore, and moshes like hardcore… it’s hardcore. Which is why I say this is the best HARDCORE album of the year.
There is so much melody and drama in this album it makes me a bit giddy, and I don’t mean drama in the Bad Girls Club sense either. I mean in it in the classic sense of intrigue, complexity, and depth. Their last album, Parting the Sea Between Brightness and Me, was fantastic in every sense of the word. It had powerful anthems like “~” and gut wrenching emotional tracks like “Face Ghost”. All of which you get with Is Survived By, but you also get so much more.
Tracks like “Just Exist”, “Is Survived By”, “Harbor”, “Non Fiction” and 8 other instances of awesomeness that show intellectual and emotional growth that, to be brutally honest, you just don’t see very often in a hardcore band. You don’t see nearly the development in lyrics and instrumentation that you do here with one notable exception being Comeback Kid who still remains one of my all time favorite hardcore bands for that very reason.
All in all this is an utterly fantastic album and has entered heavy rotation on my phone. This joins Bring Me The Horizon’s Semperternal as one of my favorite albums of the year and I can’t wait to see them live in Portland on Halloween in a few weeks so stay tuned for that concert review as well.
Rating: 5/5