After the release of their 2018 debut album All This Will Be, the members of the feverish New York screamo trio Closer dispersed up and down the Eastern seaboard. With the musicians all living in other cities, Closer had to bring serious energy and purpose to their return, and that’s what they’ve done.
Within One Stem goes on for 24 bruising minutes, and yet it feels expansive and majestic, its scratchy storms of guitar careening off its splintered lyrical bellows and channeling all the fear and doubt and anxiety hanging in the air. —Tom
Closer could have very easily broken up after releasing their debut album.
The band began out in New York City, and they found themselves separated by distance. Ryann Slauson, their fearsome vocalist and drummer, moved to Philadelphia; guitarist Matthew Van Asselt went to Pittsburgh; bassist Griffin Irvine stayed put in Brooklyn. Bands have certainly called it quits for less. Closer kept going ahead, putting together their album in borrowed practice spaces and basements and during the few times they went out on tour. They channeled that distance into a beautiful album. Within One Stem is just as awesome as 2018’s All This Will Be — one of the best hardcore albums that were from 2021 — and it’s also a great deal more refined.
At 24 minutes and after seven tracks, Within One Stem somehow feels both more compact and more sprawling than its predecessor.
Within One Stem is pretty blistering, or rather it’s both pretty and blistering. The band efficiently careen from introspective post-rock to outward aggression, their stuttering rhythms ripping and tugging with a bruising energy. Along with their New York contemporaries, Closer really tap into the violence of what it feels like to be an outsider. They are fractured and urgent and angry and also artful and composed.
They also have Slauson, whose voice is a capacious instrument that makes anything they sing-scream infinitely compelling. worthy to not that as a poet, Slauson’s lyrics are often inscrutably beautiful. Sometimes they’ll just spit out words like a dictionary and force you to fill in the blanks. On opener “Ruins In Reverse,” they rattle off: “Pressure, access, inlaid, ailment/ Shallow, features, molten, effort, callous, suture.” Slauson delivers each word with a fearsome intensity as the band hammers and billows, conveying a righteous fury that evokes craggy impossible landscapes and apocalyptic fire.
Listen to the album on spotify:
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