BALANCE & COMPOSURE (us)

The band regretted breaking up from the moment they said goodbye. Inner-band tension and exhaustion led to the band ceasing activity in early 2018, but when they stepped on stage at their 2019 farewell shows with new drummer Dennis Wilson (ex-Saves The Day), the band’s original spark was reignited. Any possibility of walking back their decision to call it quits disappeared when COVID hit just months after the farewell shows, but as the world started opening back up, the members of Balance and Composure started getting together again, just because they missed playing together. They had no concrete plan or vision, but they quickly realized they all had some ideas for new music, so they started coming up with new songs for the first time in years. About six months later, their longtime producer Will Yip heard the material they’d been working on, and he encouraged them to write a new record.

The members of Balance and Composure have families and “real jobs” these days, so finding time to get in the studio wasn’t easy, but they slowly but surely started convening at Studio 4 and laying down the new material. By 2023, they were ready to play some shows, and they announced their return alongside the release of the first two songs they finished with Will, “Savior Mode” and “Last to Know.” “We didn’t wanna come back without new music,” Jon says. “We didn’t want it to seem like a cash grab or anything like that, because that’s not what it’s for. We just wanted to make music again. That was the most important thing.”

Balance and Composure were pretty instantly met with a warm welcome from their still-strong fanbase, and now, 18 months later, they’re back with their first new album in eight years, With You In Spirit. It doesn’t include “Savior Mode” or “Last to Know” (“I don’t think they belong on the record,” Jon says), but it does include ten songs that mark a focused, cohesive, thrilling return from one of the most beloved underground rock bands of the last 15 years.

GREET DEATH (us)

Greet Death seem like one of contemporary rock’s most unknowable bands. Years before everyone else was casually intermixing grunge and shoegaze’s blistering riffs with slowcore’s drowsy pacing, Logan Gaval and Harper Boyhtari seemed to understand that there was a mutual malaise among these sonically divergent ’90s-era alt-rock subgenres that felt like a more existential take on slacker-rock ideology. It’s the same extremist coin-flip that serves as the backbone for all the best Paul Schrader screenplays, a fellow palm-of-Michigan native who’s long been fascinated with the concept of unknowable protagonists slowly introduced via the deepest depths of their souls—a belief that the only cure for the daily grind is self-annihilation or a love so deep it could pull you out of your body entirely. For Greet Death, this lyrical polarity is aided by equally contrasting vocals from the competitively sleepy band leaders singing about vivid nightmares and crawling back into bed and waiting around for death to come, both in their distinctive vocal styles. If that doesn’t sound like enough opacity for Gaval and Boyhtari to hide behind, it only gets more complicated when you factor in the band’s born-to-post affectations outside of the recording studio.

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