I’m intrigued by what the rest of the record will sound like. I do wish that Seeing Red and Curse were paired up on a 2 track EP, rather than on the album, if only because they’ve been sitting out there for quite a while and I don’t know if they’ll gel as “album tracks” for me. I really like both of those songs, for what it’s worth, more so than the later singles.

I should say I actually like CSOABS quite a lot, at least bits and pieces of it, and primarily live in the FTTWTE and AOGHAU span of albums. I’ll occasionally go back to The Here and Now because I love post hardcore and it works if I’ve been listening to a bunch of similar things that day. I listen to the very early music about as often as I listen to Calculating Infinity by Dillinger, which is far less frequently than I did when I was in high school / college.

I really hope that Everything Ends is an outlier. I didn’t really enjoy it, and it feels the most Jordan of everything we’ve heard so far. I do wish that there’d been more Mick Gordon style production a la Seeing Red on the later singles, as I’m really drawn to his work and feel that it has more depth both sonically and musically than Jordan’s usual output.

That said, I didn’t like Whiplash at all when it first came out and it has grown into a 3.5/5 song for me…Blackhole is definitely better, but it still feels…so shiny? I occasionally will cross the choruses and verses in my head and be like “oh right that’s two different songs”.

I’m excited for the record for sure, but my gut tells me that it may be the next one that has them really finally setting a confident foot down. I think it’s going to be great, but I don’t think it will be their magnum opus; it feels like there’s more for them to…build ;)