Anyone who’s seen Drain live has felt it. The electricity coming off of the stage. The communal energy of the fans singing upfront. The primal thrills of fists flying in the moshpit. The uninhibited joy emanating from every banging head, screaming lung, and airborne foot in that room. There’s nothing like a Drain show. There’s no other hardcore band like Drain. The Santa Cruz band is an institution in their genre and an affable neighbor to their adjacent ones. Punks love Drain. Metalheads love Drain. Haters can’t help but love Drain. Drain is for everyone. Well, venue security guards might not love Drain. But to everyone else: Drain…Is Your Friend. Drain -- frontman Sammy Ciaramitaro, guitarist Cody Chavez, and drummer Tim Flegal -- formed back in 2014 and cut their teeth in Santa Cruz’s fertile DIY hardcore scene. COVID lockdown couldn’t stop their 2020 debut, California Cursed, from making waves, and their 2023 follow-up, Living Proof, hit the hardcore scene like a Cali beach during hurricane season -- a torrential classic. Since then, Drain have blazed through hundreds of shows worldwide: headlining festivals, taking their friends and heroes on tour, and even playing arenas with Blink-182. Regardless of whether they're opening for pop-punk jukeboxes like Neck Deep or grabbing the stage-dive torch from Terror, Drain’s only goal is to make the crowd go buckwild.
May we all live long enough to savor our revenge. Since the release of their debut album a decade ago, indie-rock quartet Adult Mom has wholeheartedly grappled with pain, frustration, and disillusionment, all while offering koans to hopeful resilience. On Natural Causes, their fourth album, they embrace a new emotional register: rage that burns so bright you can light your way by it. Stevie Knipe, the group's principal songwriter and lead vocalist, wrote the songs on Natural Causes from 2020 to 2023 during a period of both global tumult and personal upheaval. The album arrives in the wake of Knipe undergoing intensive treatment for cancer in their late twenties, an experience that brought them into direct confrontation with their own mortality. As they started writing songs from that vantage, they found they could stare down difficult memories of abuse and toxic relationships with a new ferocity. "Feeling like you’re a prisoner in your own body to medical professionals makes you very sad, but also very angry. There were nights where I would have full tantrums. I felt like a 13-year-old just from the pure anger of it," says Knipe. "You revert to this childlike state of, This is not fair! It unlocks those other moments in your life when you were like, This is not fair." Though Knipe has been out as queer and non-binary since Adult Mom's debut, their relationship to their identity, like many queer artists', has evolved and revealed itself in long waves. They came out as a lesbian after writing Adult Mom's lauded 2021 album Driver, and many of the songs on Natural Causes cut through the knots of compulsory heterosexuality and coerced gender normativity. Getting more deeply in touch with your own queerness can feel liberating and thrilling; it can also thaw out oceans of anger you never knew you had from all the times you had to stay alienated from yourself to survive. "Thematically, I got more comfortable with getting darker," says Knipe. "I knew there were things I wanted to explore that I didn’t get to on Driver, like the traumatic side of trying to unravel all this learned straightness. There were things happening interpersonally where I was like, OK, now I need to really tackle the tough parts of this process."