It was about a decade ago that a lot of us were logging onto Tumblr to share our affection for La Dispute by posting contextless lyrics attached to moody photography. It’s easy to look back in embarrassment at this kind of thing, but when the band dropped Panorama a few years ago many of us remembered just how good that band is when you strip them from the context of a website that ruined many of our lives in one way or another.
That particular derailed, bardic, and overwhelmingly cathartic vein of post-hardcore seems to have seen a revival in recent years—probably a TikTok thing, it’s usually a TikTok thing—with Rhode Island’s Dreamwell fitting neatly in the category. Swapping rabid vocals for Jordan Dreyer’s panic-attack intonations, their new LP Modern Grotesque dredges up some dark moments while maintaining that underlying sense of post-rock dreaminess.
“Lyrically, we wanted to explore how pain and sorrow can oftentimes precede a moment of great and profound change in one’s life,” the band shares. “In a lot of ways, this reflects the process of creating the record, too. This album has been surrounded by a couple of years of misfortune and setbacks, both as a band and in our personal lives. Finally releasing it means that we are officially on the other side, having grown and evolved as a band as a result, and we finally have an album we’re extremely proud of after all this hard work.”
The album will be self-released tomorrow (pre-order here), but you can hear the full thing early below.
