Ultimately, though, this is a record all about the core unit of Touché Amoré. From the landslide attack of Disasters to The Glue’s resonant atmospherics, drummer Elliot Babin, bassist Tyler Kirby and guitarists Clayton Stevens and Nick Steinhardt feel absolutely assured, plotting a course back across a 15-year discography to press at their own horizons. On design duties, Nick’s bold artwork – a monochrome photo of the band’s compass-point symbol trailed into the condensation on a widow – takes inspiration from having written and recorded during one of the wettest seasons in Los Angeles history, simultaneously evoking ideas of impermanence and individuality.
Primarily, of course, it’s about Jeremy’s ongoing odyssey and conversations with himself.
Flashing back to opening track Nobody’s, no lyric feels more telling than, ‘So let’s grieve in a forward direction / Neck in neck side by side / As I fixate on the road ahead / It just winds and winds and winds and winds.’
On October 31 it will be 10 years since the death of the frontman’s mother, Sandy, from breast cancer, an event which has inflected Touché’s output since. Receiving that awful news at Gainesville’s The Fest – a story heartbreakingly immortalised on 2016’s New Halloween – put a cloud over one of the band’s favourite cities and they have not returned since. Having insisted their agent land the booking, they make their return to The Fest later this month.
“I don’t want to think about Gainesville in the way I have the last 10 years,” Jeremy reckons. “I want to think about it the way I used to when playing The Fest was one of my favourite things to do. It’s going to be a whirlwind of emotion. In every grief situation, you like to think you can move on. But it’s a pipe dream. All you can try to do is understand it and learn that it’s a powerful thing.”