Touché Amoré releases today Spiral in a Straight Line

Tickets for the Touché Amoré show in Portugal are available from today, here. The phenomenon band from Los Angeles will perform on January 21, 2025, at LAV-Lisboa ao Vivo. The Los Angeles phenomenon, Touché Amoré, has been a pioneering driving force in the contemporary hardcore scene for over a decade.

Over the years, and through their discography, the band has explored and navigated through anxiety, isolation, illness, and grief. Currently, a cornerstone of post-hardcore, Touché Amoré has never ceased to look towards the future.

Their latest work, the honest and heartfelt Spiral in a Straight Line, continues the trajectory of innovation, transformation, and reflection. Translating lived experiences into a widely resonant record that continues to explore new sonic territories for the band, it is a reckoning with a monumental change—an evocative outcome of internal and external turmoil.

For the second time, the band works with renowned producer Ross Robinson (At the Drive-In, Slipknot, Glassjaw), and Spiral in a Straight Line reveals itself in discomfort. This ongoing collaboration marks a new dimension of complexity as Touché Amoré further push the boundaries of their sound while exploring their emotional core even more. A skilful and dynamic creative unit at this stage of their historic career, the band exercises intimacy with steady hands and shows new mastery over their relentlessly expressive sound. As always, they are equally deliberate and passionate.

An unfolding of tangled threads – strings, wires, knots of all kinds – takes place here, in the effort of a perspective that otherwise cannot be found. The spiral is the interiority caught in a loop of anxiety, its straight line is the attempt to maintain composure when everything seems to be falling apart. It is intensely personal. And yet, a universal presumption: what happens when one tries to remain calm for appearances’ sake, even when feeling like one is falling apart at the seams.

Jeremy Bolm, the band’s main lyricist, guitarists Nick Steinhardt and Clayton Stevens, bassist Tyler Kirby, and drummer Elliot Babin arrived individually at the rehearsal and studio space with extensive and diverse evolutions at play. In the process of creating Spiral in a Straight Line, the musicians fused in the same way but differently, compared to what Touché Amoré has done throughout their already more than a decade-long existence.

There was something in the air that the entire team seized, during the second wettest season on record in Los Angeles. The songs flowed more freely, delving deeper than ever before. With a new level of intimacy in Steinhardt’s home rehearsal space, coupled with the return to mining emotions from Robinson, Touché Amoré reaches a level of fervour that marks an exhilarating turning point in the band’s journey.

“As I fixate on the road ahead It just winds and winds and winds and winds,” Bolm laments at the end of the album’s lead track, “Nobodys” — whose narrator is a “character” who wishes to attribute everything to performance, proclaiming that, sometimes, life simply makes no sense at all. It is the first time in the band’s history that Bolm takes on those winding lyrical and vocal traits, perfectly mirroring the album’s theme as a whole.

These vocal spirals are as intentional as the visuals crafted for Spiral in a Straight Line, driven by Steinhardt. Steinhardt, the group’s seasoned artistic director, has been designing graphics for Touché Amoré, based on Bolm’s lyrics and the sonic palette of each album. This time, it sounds more like a novelty: perhaps a new beginning, a space that considers the recent past and leaves it behind at the same time. And it’s in motion – each piece, in turn, refers to the roller form of a film reel and its unrolling. The language of film, its simultaneous flatness and depth, linear yet round, coiled within itself.

The title track, “Hal Ashby”, is where these ideas converge most strongly. In a nod to the director of ‘Being There’ and ‘Harold and Maude’, the song is inspired by Ashby’s misunderstood characters; the tragedy of communication failure, the tricks we play on ourselves to convince us we’re right when, perhaps, something important is slipping away from us. A “rosy vision”, a “fool’s errand”, a “red herring!” The song itself is romantic, sonorous and lyrical, in the way it feels to see things under a certain light and to be corrected – as Bolm sings – recalibrated by an uncontrollable force.

Often, what it takes to change is not what we’ve seen in our toolbox. Sometimes, suddenly, everything is unknown. A long-time favourite song of Bolm’s was haunting him again – “Brand New Love” by Sebadoh. It’s a song about finding love in an unexpected place. And Bolm found that the chorus of that 1990 Sebadoh song fit perfectly into another of a song he was writing, which became “Subversion“.

In his words, Bolm “understood the bold request” and asked Lou Barlow if he could sing over it – and he did. The languid and melancholic song questions progress, the very concept of past and future, all while listening to Barlow’s music playing as Bolm lands in Adelaide. And then there’s Barlow at the end, with his words of new love complicating everything.

Julien Baker, now living in Los Angeles, joined the band in the studio for the first time, after two previous appearances. Baker’s voice, soft like a companion to Bolm’s, sings about “catching fire” and “burning brighter”, in the album’s closing track “Goodbye For Now”. The two harmonize – about trying to “Find new ways to not fall away”, self-forgiveness, and freeing ourselves from guilt.

“Another day repeats,” he says in ‘Mezzanine’, the central and most bombastic track of Spiral in a Straight Line. Here, everything spins and burns at the same time, a thesis on what it means to try to survive the normalcy and strangeness of stepping into a life that is both new and not new. “A tyre fire happening internally,” howls Bolm. Each thread of the record coils around this idea: going through routines but in thin air; holding on through raindrops; multiplying demons and sitting by the fence; new dead days; a spiral in a straight line; will I get used to this?

Linear and circular at the same time, Spiral in a Straight Line deals with the fear and trepidation that accompany changes that happen outside our control. The anxiety of a broken circle: how does one find the way out?

Touché Amoré will perform on January 21, 2025, at LAV-Lisboa ao Vivo, at 9:00 PM.

Always confirm with the concert hall or promoter the conditions of access, confirmation of the date or time, ticket place of sale, price, and availability.

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