Touché Amor

Mind over Matter presents Touché Amoré Stage Four 10 Year Anniversary

For more than a decade, L.A. phenoms Touché Amoré have been a driving force as vanguards of the contemporary hardcore scene. Over the years, and across their discography, the band has probed and navigated anxiety, isolation, illness, and grief. Now a bedrock of post-hardcore, Touché Amoré have never stopped looking forward. Their latest work, the deeply-felt Spiral in a Straight Line, continues on the trajectory of innovation, transformation, and reflection, translating lived experiences into a broadly resonant record that continues to explore new sonic territory for the band.

It’s a reckoning with monumental change — an evocative result of internal and external turbulence. The band’s second time working with renowned — and notorious, lore-ridden — producer Ross Robinson (At the Drive-In, Slipknot, Glassjaw), Spiral in a Straight Line revels in discomfort. This ongoing collaboration marks a new dimension of complexity as Touché Amoré further push the boundaries of their sound while delving further into their emotional core.

A deft, dynamic creative unit at this stage in their storied career, the band wields intimacy with steady hands and exhibits new mastery over their relentlessly expressive sonics. As ever, they are in equal measure deliberate and impassioned — an unraveling of tangled wires — ropes, threads, knots of all kinds — occurs here, in the effort of perspective otherwise not found.

The spiral is interiority caught in a loop of anxiety, its straight line is the attempt to keep composure when all feels as though it is falling apart. It’s intensely personal and yet a universal conceit: what happens when you’re trying to keep it together for appearances’ sake, even when you feel you’re coming undone at the seams.

Principal lyricist Jeremy Bolm, guitarists Nick Steinhardt and Clayton Stevens, bassist Tyler Kirby, and drummer Elliot Babin each came to the practice space and studio with vastly different evolutions at play. In the process of crafting Spiral in a Straight Line, they melded in the same, but different, way Touché Amoré have for their now over a decade-long stint. The songs flowed more freely and delved deeper than ever, producing a new level of intimacy and fervency that marks an ecstatic turn in the band’s pages.