Some bands need to leave parts of themselves behind in order to find growth, but Defeater knows that there’s more of themselves to be found in the places they’ve already been.
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Must Listen
By Jordan Petersen Kamp
For many bands, a debut album casts a long shadow. It’s the first assertion of what a band is, the first breath of a newborn thing. And even though it isn’t the last breath (hopefully), it’s what every subsequent breath is measured against. A band’s first album tends to make the deepest imprint on an audience, which can give every subsequent work the strange pressure of competing with what came before it. It can be distracting and counter-productive for artists to be competition with different versions of themselves, which is why many bands try to distance themselves from older material.
Defeater has a different relationship with their debut album. The Boston hardcore band formed in 2004 and released their first album, Travels, in 2008. Travels is a concept album about the collapse of a New Jersey family in the wake of World War II, detailing the toxic relationship between a father and son after the father returns from the war. Every subsequent Defeater album revolves around this family, sometimes expanding the timeline and narrative while other times zooming in on different aspects and characters in stories the band has already told. As a whole, Defeater’s discography is one long American myth exploring the trickling down of societal brokenness to individual brokenness; it’s about world wars turning into personal demons and personal demons turn into family legacies; it’s about darkness begetting darkness. And it’s a myth Defeater is committed to returning to— the world and narrative can be broadened, but everything the band is explicitly tethered to what they introduced on Travels.
The band’s new album, which is self titled and was released by Epitaph Records on May 12, is the latest entry in this story. Unlike past albums, Defeater is being tight-lipped about where exactly this one fits in the broader story— the band dodged questions from fans about the album’s overall narrative in a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” on the r/posthardcore forum, offering little outside the fact that Defeater features several characters and is their most narratively complex album to date. A scan of the lyrics shows that some of the songs take place within the war while some take place after. There are references to the military service flag system— in which family members of soldiers are given a flag with a blue star for active service members and a flag with a gold star for those killed in action— as well as references to gambling habits developed at home after the war. Like many stories revolving around World War II, there is an existential cloud hanging over the songs and the cruelty of fate is further expressed through frequent imagery of candles burning low or blowing out. On the page it’s not the most inspired use of setting to explore theme, but vocalist Derek Archambault sells it with guttural and raw throated vocals.
Defeater’s discography is also a connected universe in how it sounds. Defeater is a hardcore band, and while they have dabbled in softer sounds on albums like 2011’s Empty Days & Sleepless Nights and 2015’s Abandoned, these explorations have felt more like brief respites or intermissions— like an inhale of air in preparation of the exhale of breath. Defeater keeps pace with the band’s hardest and fastest material in songs like “Atheists in Foxholes” and “Dealer/Debtor.” But the album also finds ways to build on and reframe the band’s heaviness. With production from Will Yip— the patron saint of turning heavy bands heavier while somehow more subtle— Defeater features more layers of feedback, fuzz and noise as well as a deeper mix, with more power being drawn from the bass and low-range of rich guitar tones than on past recordings. Songs like “Desperate” and “All Roads” sound like the menacing rock of Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief reinterpreted by a much heavier band. All of this is filtered through Defeater’s expert sense for writing hardcore music— every shift to halftime and every breakdown comes at the exact moment for maximum effect.
In 2010, the US House of Representatives voted to officially add the silver star flag to the blue and gold star service flag code in an effort to represent members of the military who have disabilities and lasting effects from war injuries. The addition of the silver star flag expands an old system to recognize that the consequences of war are more complicated than just life and death. Similarly, Defeater is an album that offers more from the same. It is a band working within the stories and sounds they established for themselves ten years ago in a way that is revealing rather than limiting. Some bands need to leave parts of themselves behind in order to find growth, but Defeater knows that there’s more of themselves to be found in the places they’ve already been.
