Something needs to change by Sonnenwende

For fans of Sesame, Medieval Found Footage, February, the more intense edges of math rock, and stubbornly staying put as the world crumbles around you, Something needs to change by Sonnenwende bends screamo traditions to explore the darkest abysses of human emotion, displaying a cold resilience in the face of overwhelming personal loss. While mathy influences have always lived within the first wave emo sound, most of the early bands of that scene opted for minimal, sometimes barely even audible twinkly riffs in their quietest moments, all of which provided rich contrast from their distorted and screamed choruses. Here, however, those lulls between emotional peaks fall into the mathy ether, oftentimes retaining intensity in the guitar style or the drum beat and instead pulling back by playing extremely skeletal melodies over a frame of rhythmic complexity. Those peaks lash out against life after an unexpected and catastrophic loss, contending with the difficulty of sticking around after something which once felt eternal vanishes forever. Through the pain, we endure, spiting reality with our meager agency by choosing to remain.