THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Burbank melodic hardcore rockers Touché Amoré are back with their first new album in four years, Spiral In A Straight Line. Recorded with legendary producer Ross Robinson (KoRn, Slipknot, Glassjaw, At The Drive-In etc), Spiral In A Straight Line features collaborations with Julien Baker (Boygenius) and Lou Barlow (Dinosaur Jr., Sebadoh, Folk Implosion).
Working with Robinson for the second time — following their critically acclaimed 2020 album Lament — Spiral In A Straight Line challenges the band to dig deep again. As a result, they return with a poignant body of work that captures a distinctly universal feeling — spiraling — and getting caught in the emotional debris of the words, emotions, memories and pain that are left after things are flipped upside-down and how one keeps pushing through.
The album’s first single and opening track Nobody’s is a rousing statement of intent, rooted in life-altering changes and the turmoil of moving forward while grappling with what’s been left behind. Frontman Jeremy Bolm shares: “In just a handful of lyrics, it gives the broad strokes of the album. A song and record about forward movement while everything around you becomes destabilized.”
The song Hal Ashby is named after the acclaimed American director, known for his work in the counterculture era of ’70s cinema (Being There, Harold and Maude) and his tragically misunderstood characters. With clever turns of phrase and a powerful vocal performance, Bolm explores the idea of misunderstandings, both big and small, and expresses his desperate need for some kind of course correction.
The surreal video directed by Sean Stout depicts Bolm watching an Ashby-esque movie at the theatre, with the music blurring the line between the action on-screen and in the theatre itself. Bolm shares that “the Hal Ashby music video is half a love letter to Hal and half a dream-like interpretation of the song as a whole. Something that can be misunderstood as this or that — and finding the grace in between.”
