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."
Teenage Wrist are a difficult band to define. Over the past eight years the act have continually evolved their sound, a process that’s peaking with their third full-length Still Love. Reaching new heights in both scope and execution, the album sees the duo—Marshall Gallagher (vocalist, guitarist, bassist) and Anthony Salazar (drums, vocalist, percussion)—producing the album themselves to handcraft their most expansive collection of songs to date from the ground up. The result is a self-realized collection of songs that saw the band borrowing vintage gear, bringing in friends in the form of members from 311 and Softcult and incorporating tasteful pop sensibilities to craft a collection of songs that redefines the band’s sound while staying true to their guitar-driven roots. “With this album we were just trying to get ourselves out of the safety zone and into the danger zone,” Gallagher explains. “We took a lot of risks and it was a really fun record to make.”