Deathcrash Announce New album 'Somersaults' And Share Title Track
(Grandstand) London-based slowcore/post-rock quartet deathcrash have announced their highly anticipated new album Somersaults, due out February 27th via untitled (recs), the influential UK label behind Lauren Auder, Jerskin Fendrix, Famous and more. Alongside the announcement they've shared the title track, which opens the record and sets a nostalgic, optimistic tone over chiming guitars that build to an intoxicating, euphoric refrain of "this is shy town all the way."
"This record comes from a place of growing up, and giving up on adolescent dreams. Matt presented to us this beautiful nostalgic song, more or less fully formed, and he'd called it 'Somersaults' before the vocals were ever written for it. It became a symbol for the record more or less instantly," shared the band's bassist Patrick Fitzgerald.
deathcrash are a four-piece slowcore band comprised of Noah Bennett (drums), Patrick Fitzgerald (bass), Matthew Weinberger (guitar) and Tiernan Banks (vocals/guitar). Despite coming to prominence with other South London sensations such as Black Country, New Road, Jerskin Fendrix, Sorry and Black Midi, deathcrash have always had a distinctly mysterious energy about them, the shy kids in the corner quietly constructing something grand.
On their third album, Somersaults, deathcrash's togetherness as a band has never sounded so fundamental to their work. It's a sound that carries the weight of a near decade of friendship pushed to its extremes - its trust, its experience, its vulnerability - with no joy or discomfort omitted. Here, they are resolutely the same band that they've always been - a downed-tools four-piece of vocals, guitar, bass and drums, writing songs at the outer limits of expression.
deathcrash released their debut album Return in January 2022, a statement record standing at 65-minutes, hailed by Loud and Quiet as "an embarrassment of musical riches that is only matched by the depth of evocations that haunt the record". Not ones to rest, the band decamped to the Outer Hebrides just 6 months after this release to record Less, their sophomore record that is a focussed and lean progression of their sound, and was released to critical acclaim. The record was followed by a suite of remixes including collaborations with Water From Your Eyes & Mandy, Indiana.
While supporting Less and opening for the Jesus and Mary Chain across Europe, playing to more people than they had ever played to before, they realised the art of being less guarded over their sound. Growing into the bigger rooms, they found a freedom in not being tour guides of their own emotion, lowering the yellow umbrella at the front of the pack, dropping the audience member's hand, and not scanning faces in search of the correct response. Their music didn't need to be whispered to be fragile, and didn't need to be detonated to be raging.
By the time deathcrash started recording the new music they'd been experimenting with on tour, their existentialism was married with enjoyment and purpose, spending four days at Black Box studio in the Loire Valley, with wine, baguettes and sunshine. For an album still riddled with anxieties, there's an undeniable joy that's settled deep below the surface.
Released as a standalone single late last year, "Triumph,"is a shimmering, heartbreaking ballad of love lost to past mistakes, and a sonic acceptance that you can't change things, only learn from them and move on.
The evening before the album's release, the band will celebrate with a show at New York's Night Club 101 on February 26th. In April they'll embark on a run of UK dates to support the record.
The band's live show is visceral, intense and precise. They have historically eschewed traditional venue spaces in order to continue to build a sense of grandeur around their performances, taking them into cinemas, old car garages, skateparks, nightclubs, town halls and anything in-between. The band has toured with Codeine, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Black Country, New Road, and Have A Nice Life.
Thematically, Somersaults began to deal with a more discreet, more complicated, second "coming of age" period - nestled somewhere in the shadows of a Saturn return, not profound enough for its own cosmic undertones nor exultant enough for Jungian philosophy. It's embarrassed and it's ordinary. But where the cartography of a coming-of-age story maps out a start and an end, the full-stop is dishonest, and rarely confronts the grief that comes next if life still hasn't worked out as expected post-adolescence. Somersaults soundtracks the bright-lighted firsts calcifying into memory, and the wide-eyed undulations of youth furrowing. But all of its bleakness is pragmatic, and its mere existence shimmers with an everyday euphoria.
"There is something about this album that's a reflection on growing up, or a shift from adolescence to adulthood," Banks explains. "That doesn't feel like a very interesting thing to say artistically, but I think there was this do or die fatalism in our previous music that doesn't exist here. Adolescence is feeling like you're gonna live forever, but also that you want to die right now - and they're basically the same feeling. And then growing up is somewhere much more in the middle. It's less exciting, but it's more sustainable. It's like losing the idealisation of the beginning stages of a relationship - you and them against the world - and being sad that it's gone, but also - thank God. Because what you now have is real."
Its ten tracks are more vocal heavy than any of deathcrash's catalogue to date, 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 - the flickers of light you only notice after you've stayed somewhere long enough for the shadows to shift. Ideas that start in one song finish three songs later, and splinters reappear. Cathartic builds are muddied with tenderness, from the freeform rehearsal fragments of 'Bella' to the thundering outro of 'The Thing You Did' - Fitzgerald's bass a heavy grounding, Bennett's drums an exhausted but determined heartbeat grasping for moments of air.
Finished at Haggerston's Holy Mountain Studio, there are still plenty of instants where deathcrash bow to their role as caretakers of Duster, Low and Codeine's slowcore lineage - songs scud to a narcotic crawl, sound monolithic and inwards before spotlighting a crystalline stillness. But more so than before, even the silence feels collaborative - a gesture of communal trust - friends making room for each other's ghosts.
When all the fat is cut from an album's narrative - this, a long-winded attempt to understand what the band has spent the last couple of years writing about - it's best just said that Somersaults is a document of four people tumbling forward, and landing the jump.
Tour Dates
Feb 26 - New York, NY @ Night Club 101
Apr 12 - Bristol, UK @ The Exchange
Apr 14 - Glasgow, UK @ Stereo
Apr 15 - Manchester, UK @ YES
Apr 16 - London, UK @ The Garage
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