5 Great Screamo Albums from 2024 So Far
Every year is a good year for screamo, and 2024 is no exception. There have been some real heavy hitters this year, and as we enter the last quarter of the year, we’re giving a quick look back on five screamo albums from 2024 that have really been sticking with us. There have been way more than five great screamo albums released in the past 8 months (and even more splits/EPs/etc), so this is by no means comprehensive; it’s just a small sample size of five records we hope you haven’t missed.
State Faults – Children of the Moon (Deathwish Inc/Dog Knights)
State Faults often take long breaks between albums, and they don’t tend to tour very extensively either, but it’s quality over quantity when it comes to this band, and Children of the Moon just might be their best album yet. (And that’s saying something!) Having made one of their heaviest albums with 2019’s Clairvoyant, State Faults really open up their sound and deliver their most musically-varied with Children of the Moon. It’s an album that entirely transcends the niche screamo scene that State Faults have called home for many years without abandoning it. Without toning down an ounce of their usual harsh fury, the band incorporate more clean vocals, more post-rock, more black metal, more experimentation, longer songs (one’s over 10 minutes and one’s over nine), and just more everything into their music on this album. Having recorded their last two albums with the great Jack Shirley, they made this one with producer Chris Teti (of The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die), and I’d imagine they connected with Chris over a shared love of pushing yourself past your own limits. Beyond whatever specific subgenre it is, this is music for people who love big ideas, fearless ambition, emotional sincerity, and overwhelming intensity. If you turn it up loud and let it wash over you, it’s gonna leave an impact.
Respire – Hiraeth (Dine Alone)
Toronto’s Respire are a “screamo band” inasmuch as Converge are a “metalcore” band. Like, yeah, but… you know? They’re as much a guitar/bass/drums band as they are an orchestral act, as likely to dish out throat-shredding shrieks and guttural growls as they are to engage in uplifting, communal singalongs that feel like religious experiences. Maybe I’m just influenced by the Canada connection, but they’ve always struck me as the Godspeed You! Black Emperor of screamo and that rings truer than ever to me on Hiraeth. Not only do many of their arrangements sound closer to Godspeed than to Orchid, they also operate with a similar ethos–a many-membered collective with a knack for ornate instrumentation and punk spirit. (On this album, the core seven-piece lineup is joined by three “extended family” members, it was engineered by Sean Pearson, and the aforementioned Jack Shirley mixed and mastered it.) The band have referred to the album as “a manifesto of the immigrant experience; a call for all of us to embrace our shared humanity, awaken to the fragility of our existence, and confront the crises we face collectively before it’s too late,” and though Hiraeth very much has the sense of urgency that “too late” is in the near future, it’s also shimmering with a sense of hope. Not just with the lyrics but with the tone of the music itself, Hiraeth forces you to picture a better world.
Frail Body – Artificial Bouquet (Deathwish)
It’s been a long five years since Frail Body took the screamo world by storm with their back-to-back 2019 releases–their debut LP A Brief Memoriam and a four-way split with Infant Island, Massa Nera, and dianacrawls–during which time guitarist/vocalist Lowell Shaffer was also busy with Crowning, but now Frail Body are finally back with their sophomore album and it’s a very clear step up. Like Infant Island did on this year’s Obsidian Wreath, Frail Body are really leaning into the black metal side of screamo with Artificial Bouquet, and these songs are the heaviest, most beautiful, and most jaw-dropping this band has ever sounded.
Infant Island – Obsidian Wreath (Secret Voice)
Infant Island have been a little less prolific since putting out two releases during 2020 lockdown, the Beneath LP and the Sepulcher mini LP, and since the world opened back up, the band finally got to support those albums on tour as members put out music with their other projects. But as far back as 2020, they were already writing their next album, Obsidian Wreath, and now it’s finally here. It follows their contribution to Touché Amoré vocalist Jeremy Bolm’s 2023 screamo compilation Balladeers, Redefined, and it’s also their first for Jeremy’s label Secret Voice. And it was worth the wait–it might just be their very best album yet.
Produced by hometown screamo legend and past collaborator Matt Michel (of Majority Rule and Nø Man), it’s the band’s most seamless fusion of OG-style screamo and atmospheric black metal yet. Comparisons are still warranted to Majority Rule and other Virginia screamo pioneers like pageninetynine and City of Caterpillar, but it also sounds like if Deafheaven’s Sunbather was condensed into two-minute songs. And like that album, Obsidian Wreath sounds majestic; it perfectly walks that line between heavy and beautiful. Andrew Schwartz of fellow Virginia band .gif from god lends screams to the attention-grabbing album opener “Another Cycle” and “Clawing, Still”; the climactic gang vocals on “Veil” include members of Unearth, For Your Health, King Yosef, Senza, Malevich, Mikau, and more; and Infant Island really stretch their wings when Harper Boyhtari and Logan Gaval of past tourmates Greet Death add clean vocals to the shoegazy penultimate track “Kindling.” The whole thing just sounds massive and full of intention. It feels like it was built to stand out from the pack and that’s exactly what it does.
Massa Nera / Quiet Fear – Quatro Vientos // Cinco Soles (Persistent Vision)
The same day Infant Island released their new album, we got a split LP from Infant Island’s recent tourmates (and fellow Balladeer Redefiners) Massa Nera and Quiet Fear. The two bands alternate their songs throughout the LP, and it ends with a collaborative song from both bands, “Nueva llama.” The bands are from opposite coasts, and they each bring something different to the screamo table that pairs really well with the other band. Quiet Fear hail from LA and they feel rooted in the kind of West Coast screamo that Comadre crafted in the 2000s, with theatrical shrieks, old school punk energy, and some Latin rhythms thrown in, while NJ’s Massa Nera’s songs feel a little heavier and riffier, with elements of sludge and mathcore. And then the two bands come together to close out with a gradually-building, climactic collab.
Splits have always been great for community-building, and that was very much the idea for this split, which Quiet Fear says they hope “serves as an example for a stronger connection of the screamo and hardcore community as a whole,” adding that they’re “trying to open the door for folks like us to never feel that this music is out of reach or not for them.” And they’re strengthening that community in the face of the unjust world that we all live in. “The only way forward is side-by-side with the people we love,” says Massa Nera.
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Frail Body and State Faults are both gearing up to open separate legs of Pianos Become the Teeth’s Keep You 10th anniversary tour; Frail Body are on the East Coast dates (along with Stay Inside) and State Faults are on the West Coast dates (along with K. Soto of Seahaven). All dates here.
State Faults will, however, do their own East Coast tour with support from Massa Nera leading up to The Fest. All dates here.
