Description

deathcrashs third album, Somersaults, glimmers with an everyday euphoria. The London-based slowcore/ post-rock quartet has always had an affinity for building worlds only to crush them. From their breakout EP, People thought my windows were stars (2021), through two critically acclaimed studio albums, Return (2022) and Less (2023), they have been both the architects and the destroyers, the creationists and the ones manning the flood barrier. But, recorded between Black Box Studio in the Loire Valley and Haggerstons Holy Mountain, Somersaults is almost joyful.

Its ten tracks are more vocal heavy than any of the bands catalogue think Mark Linkous via The Kinks but lyrically, Somersaults resists revelation. For all its abrasion, phrases appear half-swallowed, broken off at the edge of meaning, consumed by the smaller textures of living. Thirty, no career, it fucking worries me / And doing the band doesnt help, Banks sings in NYC. But, This life is the best life, he finishes in CMC on top of the ambient white noise of an office printer, thankful that the band is still there, still making noise in the doorway.

Their role as caretakers of Duster, Low and Codeines slowcore lineage is all across Somersaults songs scud to a narcotic crawl, sound monolithic and inwards before spotlighting a crystalline nothing. Cathartic builds are muddied with tenderness, the bass a heavy grounding, the drums an exhausted heartbeat grasping for air. But more so than ever, even the silence feels collaborative a gesture of communal trust friends celebrating the room theyve made for each others ghosts, and some of the biggest, brightest songs theyve made to date.