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When Michael Cauldwell wanted his nine-year-old son Sami to hit the body of a guitar during a recording, Sami’s first instinct was to hold back. Michael was listening through headphones. Sami could not hear the music, so his father directed him with one hand, telling him when to hit the guitar and encouraging him to use more force. Sami tapped it once. Then again, slightly harde...

Break To Broken still carry plenty of the clipped guitars, restless rhythm and punk economy that first connected them through Fugazi and the wider Dischord orbit. On “The Hope Experiment“, that shared vocabulary has produced a 12-song LP made across three home setups and now being distributed by four independent labels in four countries. The three people responsible for it still...

The strangest thing about calling an album “joy” is how quickly the word starts to look suspicious. Repeat it enough and it loses its certainty. Is joy pleasure? Contentment? Purpose? Relief? A permanent state you arrive at after making enough correct decisions? Or can it be ten good seconds in the middle of a terrible day? Ethan Reed spends much of Sleepthink‘s second full-leng...

Before the old Magnavox radio ended up on a French Inhaler record, it spent some time in Adam O’Leary’s dining room. He had tracked it down specifically for the band’s recording session, brought it home, set it up and got attached to it. His wife would leave it playing while they ate, tuning into classical and jazz stations. Adam liked the warmth of the ageing circuits and the c...

Paul first read William Ernest Henley‘s “Invictus” while he was still in grade school. Long before React existed, the poem had already given him an idea he would keep returning to: suffering and uncertainty may be outside your control, but your response to them is not. Years later, that thought found its way into “Navigator“. Paul wrote the song around a sailor who knows the sea...