Jordan Dreyer of La Dispute defined his scene for years to come when he declared his band part of “The New Wave of Post-Hardcore”. He was also joking, but then again, post-hardcore isn’t known for its sense of humor. Despite his claims that he was making a tongue-in-cheek statement, this so-called new wave of friends and scene compatriots were some of the most exciting bands going; Touché Amoré, La Dispute, Defeater, Pianos Become the Teeth, and Make Do and Mend were considered the core, and the already-elastic boundaries stretched to include classicist alt-rock acts like Balance and Composure, melodic punk such as Title Fight and even Into It. Over It., a decidedly non-hardcore singer-songwriter vehicle.
Fans (and writers) ran with the TNOWPH tag, naturally. When “the Wave” became a topic of discussion, we were on the cusp of marking the 10-year anniversaries of genre-defining works such as Thursday’s War All the Time, Glassjaw’s Worship and Tribute and Thrice’s The Artist in the Ambulance. A decade ago, there was a vast chasm between what each of these respective bands conveyed: Geoff Rickly’s hyper-literate emoting and Daryl Palumbo’s macho posturing and Dustin Kensrue’s earnestness-- yet there was peership between them and what they were holding together. Looking at the last year (and change) it’s easy to spot the similarities amid the elite bands of TNOWPH, and how their output will likely inspire similar reverence in the future.
The major commonality, beyond boundary-pushing, is that all these bands have rejected hardcore (and post-hardcore’s) blinkered perspective. They all acknowledge a world outside of hardcore and a showing a willingness to interact with it. Defeater made another uncompromising concept record about a family being destroyed by post-war torment and alcoholism, but took a slot on 2014’s Greatest Generation Tour with the Wonder Years, Modern Baseball, Real Friends and Citizen - the first of the three are widely considered at the forefront of classicist pop-punk, as are Fireworks, the band that replaced Defeater when Derek Archambault’s hip problems finally required surgery and a cancellation of their dates.
Months earlier, in September 2013, Touché Amoré raised the stakes for their peers by releasing the galvanizing Is Survived By, a record that capably shouldered the burdens and pressure of being the great hardcore hope. Since 2011’s Parting the Sea Between Brightness and Me, their label Deathwish, Inc. had become 2013’s hottest hardcore imprint, due in large part to the return of Modern Life is War--a band whose influence most clearly manifested in Touché Amoré --and Deafheaven’s Sunbather, an album whose iconic cover art was the handiwork of TA guitarist/graphic designer Nick Steinhardt. Is Survived By was instantly revered an example of a really good band becoming great, and that carried on into 2014. They toured relentlessly with bands ranging from stadium goth-punk act AFI to mewithoutYou to Tigers Jaw to Rise Against. And by playing UK festivals but not the Warped Tour and commemorating the death of Westboro Baptist Church leader Fred Phelps with a T-shirt whose proceeds went to the Human Rights Campaign, they maintained their status as one of post-hardcore’s keener ethical barometers.
This had the unintended effect of putting the focus right back on the original author of TNWOPH when La Dispute returned in March of this year with Rooms of the House their first release since 2011’s Widlife. It would be disingenuous to call Rooms “underrated.” Those who did rate it were unsparing in their praise. As for it being “overlooked,” that is par for the course in post-hardcore; TNWOPH is something of a inverse genre, a means of describing not so much what a band is, as what they aren’t, i.e., too studied and serious for punk, not melodic enough for pop-punk, not soft enough for emo, not prog enough to be metalcore. Post-hardcore bands aren’t subject to the ridicule those genres often receive, but there’s no discernible scene or aesthetic code either that makes for devotees. You’d be hard-pressed to find “Defend Post-Hardcore” t-shirts or “Post-Hardcore” DJ nights.
Rooms of the House, likewise, had few overt markings of a crossover breakthrough. It wasn’t a major artistic shift for La Dispute, just a more well-written and better produced version of what came before. And La Dispute’s storytelling hardcore is a genre of one, to call it "novellacore" or "mosh-lit" or something else that would be unconscionably embarrassing. At its (soft)core, Rooms of the House is a personal concept album where a man experiences a catastrophic breakup and is left to figure out what went wrong, tormented and trying to find meaning in the remnants of the past. Dreyer’s lyrics are rife with prose and poesy: it’s set in a number of small Midwestern cities, and weaves in historical events (such as the I-35 collapse in Minnesota) and a number of generational shifts into it’s vast personal drama.
Everything about La Dispute suggests stone sobriety and seriousness often at odds with current trends - when La Dispute are quiet, they sound somewhere in between Fugazi and Dismemberment Plan, and when Dreyer hits his higher register, they evoke Zack De La Rocha fronting Cursive (not exactly au courant). La Dispute also deal in fiction within a genre that valorizes keeping it real - as detailed and rich as Dreyer’s lyrics are here, he puts you in a position of having to empathize and relate to people who don’t exist.
Rooms of the House is rendered stunningly lifelike throughout, however. The couple at the center of the story go to family gatherings (“there’s a dinner thing, Thanksgiving”), discuss interior decoration, try to find work, boil coffee on the stove, argue about each other’s drinking (“I guess I was never cut out for the coke scene” being one of the more darkly humorous lines), and take trips to places like Terre Haute. “For Mayor in Splitsville” peaks with Dreyer repeating, “but I guess in the end, we just moved furniture around”; it’s a shrugging, understated way of implicating every happy Midwestern home as a potential Titanic.
For a Serious Breakup Album, Rooms of the House is hardly cathartic; it’s funny and wry and a little too real and raw. “For Mayor in Splitsville” revels in preferring your own sense of humor to suffering another person’s glib jokes ever again. Rooms of the House can also be heartbreakingly romantic - though “Woman (reading)” got the artfully shot, interpretive dance video, “Woman (in mirror)” proved to be one of the year’s most touching, gorgeously written love songs--the narrator watches his wife get dressed and pledges, “there are moments here/only yours and mine/tiny dots on an endless timeline” - all the more devastating upon knowing its inevitable end. It was a banner year for records weaving interconnected character studies and Rooms of the House deserves to be mentioned alongside Benji and My Krazy Life for its sheer comprehensiveness and depth.
While Rooms of the House seems like the kind of milestone release whose reputation will only increase in the coming years, in the short term, their triumph did ease the way for an even more dramatic shift from Pianos Become the Teeth, who were likely the toughest sell of all the Wave. For all intents and purposes, Pianos Become the Teeth could be described as “screamo”, the subgenre whose name is most inversely proportional to the music therein in terms of hilarity. And with the exception of Envy, they were the one screamo band it was OK to like. Stress the “was” - leading up to Keep You, they did everything possible to encourage antiquated ideas of them “selling out.” Kyle Durfey stopped actually screaming, they discovered melody and production (courtesy of Will Yip, who also manned Rooms of the House) and signed to Epitaph.
Keep You was a true post-hardcore document in that it removed just about any stylistic tie besides the intensity - Durfey reckoned with death and familial dissolution, David Haik’s pugilistic drumming was toned down to sniper precision, and the lush guitars provided a tactile, overcast atmosphere that made their native Baltimore sound like a Scottish burg. Even though the Twilight Sad and We Were Promised Jetpacks were grandfathered into emo and somehow became peers of Pianos Become the Teeth, the latter somehow made the best Glasgow album of 2014.
With Make Do and Mend set to release their next album in February, the Wave has to ebb for most of 2015. Touché Amoré announced a break for “mental and physical health sake”, and La Dispute and Pianos Become the Teeth will likely require breathers. The question, then...who’s next?
If you’ve spent any time mulling that over, one of the best post-hardcore albums of 2014 was also one that provided the least amount of hope for the future. Fitting it should come from Geoff Rickly, given his access to perspective; the guy’s endured about 12 or so years of hardcore bands making weak attempts at ripping off Full Collapse as their “mature phase” and he’s been a staunch advocate for electronic music as being the one place where the deconstructive ideals of punk can still thrive. As such, United Nations’ album/multimedia project The Next Four Years proved to be an elaborate joke at the expense of punk rock, the punchline being that hardcore has actually lived up to its name and ossified into a stone tablet of unbreakable rules; a mode that once seemed dedicated to unlimited expression has absolutely nothing new to say.
That doesn’t mean it has lost its potency--The Next Four Years showed Rickly might still save us yet, with self-reflexive and hilarious rants about white privilege, artistic commodification and the same topics that hardcore has struggled with for years (or, uh, decades). There were certainly a number of promising purist acts, My Fictions, Xerxes, Frameworks, to name a few. Ultimately, they may prove Rickly right in the meantime--post-hardcore has slowly narrowed and stressed the latter part of the hyphenate and often appears closed off to influences from outside.
In light of this, Code Orange’s I Am King felt like the most forward-thinking post-hardcore record of 2014. The Pittsburgh band’s coed vocals and incorporation of electronics made their auspicious 2012 Deathwish debut Love is Love/Return to Dust an intriguing rarity at the least. They concurrently dropped “kids” from their original name and called their new record I Am King, instantly announcing their second LP as a statement. There wasn’t much else out there as disorienting as I Am King’s opening title track - in less than three minutes, Code Orange toggle between black-metal growls and menacing mutters, electronic blast beats and punctuating silences, hardcore and hip-hop. It wants to be awesome in at least six different genres and succeeds at nearly all of them.
I Am King doesn’t settle much after that, you get lengthy spans of exhaust-sucking shoegaze, metalcore noise terrorism, just about anything except a chance to figure out what exactly Code Orange are really about. Does it make a lick of sense? Absolutely not, and the fact that several members of Code Orange play in the fizzy alt-rock band Adventures makes the commitment and rigor of I Am King even more impressive and confounding. But it sure as hell is exciting and while the Wave’s bands were committed to realization and cohesion, Code Orange were an uncontrolled hurricane of ideas and information, all crashing on your head at once.
When I Am King dropped a few months ago, I recalled how Code Orange opened for Fucked Up during their 2013 tour and how jarring the sight was; the kids in the audience were barely out of their teens. The destroy-and-rebuild cycle of punk rock was the subject of Fucked Up’s Glass Boys, the June 2014 release from a band who have been post-hardcore’s de facto pacesetter for most of the past decade. On previous LPs Hidden World, The Chemistry of Common Life and David Comes to Life, Fucked Up righteously defied hardcore ideals with their rock-opera conceptual gambits, convoluted song structures and extravagant studio tinkering. But by Glass Boys, all of that classic rock playacting turned out to be a portend for Fucked Up themselves becoming a predictable, staid classic rock band; songs like “Echo Boomer” and “Paper the House” found them all but admitting to their status as elders waiting to be deposed. Much like how the searing, volatile early works of La Dispute and Touché Amoré could be heard as responses to Fucked Up’s immaculate prog-hadcore, Code Orange sound radical and maybe even a little absurd compared to the more assured and accomplished TNWOPH. As they should--as exciting as the crest has been, the trough is inevitable and hopefully, more bands will take after I Am King and have the audacity to call themselves the new New Wave.