Cloud Nothings
Final Summer
PURE NOISE
ABOVE THE CURRENT
Cloud Nothings achieved an early, major artistic breakthrough at the beginning of 2012 with their sophomore record Attack on Memory, an explosive collection of post-hardcore that seemed to hit reset on a still-young act previously peddling in power-pop. Recorded with Steve Albini, the album felt attuned to the veteran engineer’s long list of credits, with searing guitars and punchy snares that recalled the likes of some of his prior recordings with Superchunk, Jawbreaker, and Pixies. More importantly, it revealed Cloud Nothings as a proper band rather than as the solo project of Dylan Baldi, creating music that reflects the instrumental chemistry between the group’s players as much as it does the songwriting of their leader.
More than a decade has passed since that album’s release, but it proved auspicious for the next 12 years of progression for Cloud Nothings. Each of the half-dozen albums they’ve released since has built on that abrasive and austere template, sometimes in the form of brighter pop songs, as on 2017’s Life Without Sound, or via heavier noise-rock pummel on 2018’s Last Burning Building. With each permutation they approached that magnetic intensity from a different angle, but that taut, muscular core remained consistently intact. And it remains an essential anchor on the soaring anthems of the group’s eighth album, Final Summer.
All the necessary building blocks of a Cloud Nothings record are still present on Final Summer: driving rhythms, distorted guitars, anthemic choruses, song lengths (mostly) under four minutes apiece. But even as the aesthetic of the band largely remains rooted in the urgency of influences like Wipers and Hüsker Dü, their songwriting has grown more sophisticated and nuanced over time, even occasionally incorporating elements that you might not have expected from prior Cloud Nothings records. The opening title track is one such example, featuring an impressively big production built on krautrock-like rhythmic repetitions and burbling synthesizer backdrop, as Baldi starts off the record with a bright message of hope: “Put your hand in my hand / Give it to another / Keep away the bad things / Fill yourself with color.”
That optimism colors much of Final Summer, replacing some of the angst and volatility of earlier Cloud Nothings songs with a measured positivity. On the tuneful, earnest “Running Through the Campus,” Baldi declares, “I never run for anyone else / It’s just a thing I do for myself,” while in the slower, hazier “On the Chain,” he asks, “Do you dream about the world you know? / Do you want to change a thing at all?” And on the final song “Common Mistake,” Baldi offers a simple reassurance: “You’ll be alright, just give more than you take.”
The sentiments are warmer, perhaps, but Cloud Nothings haven’t softened. The band’s energy level never slackens throughout Final Summer, and the entirety of the record’s half-hour run time sounds massive, even at its most deceptively simple. But in moments like “I’d Get Along,” a towering anthem in which Baldi wrings every last ounce of power from only two lines, Cloud Nothings reveal how much artistic growth they’ve undergone.
