Touché Amoré: Spiral in a Straight Line

Touché Amoré have always maintained a talent for evoking nostalgia through sound and mixing it with themes that become more prevalent as we get older. It’s this union of past and present that makes Touché Amoré one of the few cinematic hardcore bands out there.

The Los Angeles band’s last two albums, 2016’s Stage Four and 2020’s Lament were every bit as harrowing as Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen. Stage Four, centred on the loss of Jeremy Bolm’s mother to cancer, while Lament dealt with the aftershocks. The singer enters a slightly different blast zone on Touché Amoré’s latest volley, Spiral in a Straight Line, which unravels like a running commentary on a relationship break-down.

Alongside his bandmates, guitarists Clayton Stevens and Nick Steinhardt, bassist Tyler Kirby and drummer Elliot Babin, Bolm wearily navigates a fresh hell, revealing songs that contain edges beneath their own edges. Songs where can almost feel the tension vicariously as Bolm delivers them through the harsh lens of reality.

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Once again harnessed by Ross Robinson from behind the studio glass, Touché Amoré’s high-wire intensity and big-hearted choruses hit the mark as flush as ever. The hairpin turns on opening cut, Nobody’s, like build-up of serotonin as Bolm uses politicians and their fake exterior as a composite to underline a relationship coming apart at the seams.

Yet another vivid snapshot of the peaks and troughs of life, the bullet-speed Disasters rivals the ferocity of Lament’s opening gambit, Come Heroine, while Hal Ashby – named after the counterculture film director – is a tale of self-assessment (“A misguided Hal Ashby catastrophe / Not exactly something you plan to be / You gotta to handle it gracefully”).

As the nervous energy of Altitude explores someone at loggerheads with pattern and routine and, indeed, spiraling in a straight line, the one-two rabbit punch of Force of Habit and This Routine sees the band dig a litter deeper. The latter, a story exposing the chasm opening up between two people over a period of time (“We say goodnight a different times / You’re on your way to a new day / While I’m far behind”). Barrelling through a dark reality, Bolm soon realises that the situation becomes clearer the further you move away from it. (“You’ve got a taste for the finer things / I don’t know how I can keep up.”)

The swirling epic that is Subversion (Brand New Love) sees Touché Amoré adding variations to the Sebadoh cut with the assistance of Lou Barlow himself. Here, Bolm takes the freeing nature of lo-fi adopting his own principles to peddle the pain (“It’s aching differently this time“).

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And while things come to a head during the blinding flash and turbulence of The Glue, Bolm slowly emerges from the wreckage to spearhead yet another epic Touché Amoré closer. Once again featuring Julien Baker, Goodbye for Now sees Bolm’s lyrical acrobats score the perfect 10 with a story of twists, turns and razor-sharp metaphors that, with time, may just exceed the majesty of Sky Scraper and A Forecast.

“We’re tangled up and it’s not easy / We’re spun around / We’re unravelling”, Bolm confesses on Mezzanine. It’s a vital snapshot to Spiral in a Straight Line, suggesting that it’s sometimes easier to stay in a relationship than face the ultimate reality. Like always, there’s shirking the problem, and it’s this approach that sees Touché Amoré’s music as unnerving as much as it is cathartic. Using the uncertainties of life as their catalyst to create, Touché Amoré frame it in a way that few others do. And while Bolm sounds exhausted on Spiral in a Straight Line, the toll of the last decade becoming evident, it doesn’t make the songs any weaker. In fact, it adds to their authenticity in what is another statement that burns deep into the mind.

Spiral in a Straight Line is out next Friday via Rise Records. Purchase here.