Review: The Sound of Animals Fighting – The Maiden

Style: Post-Hardcore, Experimental Rock, Progressive Rock, PBR&B (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Saosin, Circa Survive, Rx Bandits, Psychedelic Porn Crumpets
Country: California, United States
Release date: 12 September 2025

As the resident post-hardcore connoisseur at The Subway,¹ I feel obligated to educate my colleagues about the genre. Unlike dissodeath, which is one of cowriter Andy‘s many specialist subjects, PHC is a genre that I think people should actually listen to. On our Discord server, I’ve organized listening parties for albums like Cursive‘s The Ugly Organ as well as seminal emo records like Jimmy Eat World‘s Bleed American.² So when I heard experimental / PHC darlings The Sound of Animals Fighting were releasing a new record, I knew I had to check it out before adding it to this semester’s curriculum.

TSOAF are a supergroup and a collective, consisting (at various points) of members from Rx Bandits, Circa Survive, and Chiodos, among others. The band’s sound is rooted in their shared punk influence, but skews heavily experimental, defying clear categorisation. Few bands exhibit a breadth of styles as wide as those which appear on any one of the albums in their back catalog. To understand the context of their latest album, The Maiden, we need to take a quick historical detour…

TSOAF‘s 2005 debut, Tiger and the Duke,³ opens with an avant-garde three minute reversed-vocals, sliding-synth, echoing-drums piece which can only be described as “experimental”, while the very next track ticks basically every PHC checkbox: energetic, uptempo, guitar-heavy, alternating harsh and clean vocals, and lyrics about fractured relationships.⁴ After Tiger, TSOAF leaned more heavily into the experimental side of their sound. “Stockhausen, Es Ist Ihr Gehirn, Das Ich Suche”, off of 2006’s Lover, The Lord Has Left Us…, for example, features kitchen-utensil percussion underlying an opera singer performing a 19th century German poem. Lover also contains multiple a capella tracks and a Hindu prayer sung in Sanskrit. Their second-to-last album, 2008’s The Ocean and The Sun, eschewed the rigid song structure of Tiger, opting for longer, more meditative pieces. “The Ocean And The Sun”, the first track proper on the album,⁵ features highly dissonant guitar playing and concludes by dissolving into a melange of noise and feedback while a spoken word performer details to the listener the faulty premises of utilitarianism and the benefits of collectivism. That’s what the kids want from rock music, right?

And that’s where they left us, for over a decade, patiently waiting for new sounds, new animals, new fighting. Then Apeshit dropped in 2022. The only obvious difference between this four-track EP and the band’s previous work is organizational: a cleaner separation between the slower, more experimental tracks and the energetic, post-hardcore-influenced ones. The bleeding and blending of styles on single pieces is largely dialed back, if not entirely absent. This works well on a four-track EP, with alternating tracks of different styles. In fact, it’s not unlike the “palate cleansing” of the interwoven “Interlude”s on Tiger And The Duke. Apeshit set the stage for TSOAF‘s latest full-length album, The Maiden, their first in nearly two decades. Those intervening seventeen years gave plenty of time to speculate: would this be a seamless continuation of the band’s earlier work? Would there be more PHC-influenced tracks, more experimental ones, or an even split? Would they continue the heavy-soft interweaving of tracks across the album runtime? Who in the collective would be back for the next album? Most importantly: would this album stand toe-to-toe with its predecessors?

The Maiden is tamer, experimentally, than what came before. Gone are the poems translated into and recited in foreign languages, gone is the kitchen-utensil instrumentation. But the band’s penchant for stylistic exploration is alive and well. On the back half of the album, “The Horror”, arguably the band’s first hip hop track, has a cloud rap style beat and (quite repetitive) lyrics about Nancy Drew, of all things. The two short verses of the song, a kidnapping is described, perhaps as a metaphor for being stuck in a dead-end relationship. “Pretty Like Cake” might interest fans of TV On The Radio: this piece has a chill hip hop PBR&B feel, with a stronger pulse. “Kaleidoscope” is built on a trip-hop base with many layers of complementary vocal melodies overlaid.⁶ Aside from the heavy hip hop influence on these few tracks, there is little about The Maiden which would be out of place on a bog-standard PHC record. Rich Balling, the founder of the band, has found other creative outlets for his more experimental proclivities, like Hospital Gown, his side project which recently released an album featuring hyperpop artists and rappers alike. Perhaps that has sucked some of the more left-field ideas away from this latest TSOAF work.

The pacing of The Maiden leaves something to be desired, as well. The first half of the album is heavy: “The Maiden”, “Evil Sprites”, “Bangladesh”, and “Lady of the Cosmos” all feature either harsh vocals from Anthony Green, shout-singing from Rich Balling, or passionate belting from Matt Embree. “Lady of the Cosmos” has math rock style guitar work reminiscent of the band’s earlier work like “The Heraldic Beak of the Manufacturers Medallion” off of The Ocean and the Sun, or Tiger‘s “Act II”. “The Maiden” starts slower but ramps up about halfway through, hitting an early crescendo, where frantic guitars, tumbling drums, and overlapping harsh vocals all fight for centre stage. The front half of this album is a steam engine, barreling forward with an incredible enthusiasm, but after “Lady of the Cosmos” ends with twinkly arpeggiated guitar and synths, that frenzied energy disappears entirely, like we’ve crossed the event horizon of a black hole.

“Chrysanthemum”, the first track on the back half, is painfully beautiful. No distortion, minimal drums, highly melodic guitars, and layers of vocals from every singer in the band create a gorgeous ebb and flow. If this song had been the closing track of a five-song EP, I’d say TSOAF had knocked it out of the park. But the back half of the album contains solely slower or lower-energy tracks: no harsh vocals, no heavy guitars, no uptempo sections. It slumps. Because the truly experimental aspects of TSOAF have apparently been siphoned off to other groups, these slower songs are also less interesting from an artistic perspective. I usually don’t want to listen to half an album of PHC followed by half an album of trip hop. The closing tracks “Kanda” and “The Fall of Western Civilization” bring the album to a close in a rock context, at least, but I could have done with one more all-out bonkers PHC bop, or an interweaving of the heavy and slow tracks which already exist on the album. This album will definitely be in my regular rotation, but I’ll probably spin something else after the end of “Chrysanthemum”.

The Maiden is a work rife with contrasts. At times, it’s gorgeous, delicate and intricate, at other times blunt and repetitive; it is a return to form while breaking new ground; it’s energetic and invigorating, sedate and calming. But the pacing of the album leaves the listener with a bad taste in their mouth⁷ at its conclusion. Coming from a band with such a storied track record of way-out-there experimentation, this latest album is also disappointingly normie. TSOAF have woven the rich tapestry of human experience into ten short tracks, but they’ve used really thick wool and haven’t quite got the hang of those needle things. The Maiden isn’t perfect, but bits and pieces of it are, and if you ignore some of its more glaring flaws, squint, and tilt your head to the side, it’s exactly the album we’ve been waiting twenty years for.

Recommended tracks: Lady Of The Cosmos, The Maiden, Chrysanthemum, Evil Sprites
You may also like: Hrvrd, Alpha Male Tea Party, Bear Vs. Shark, The Autumns
Final verdict: 7/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Official Website | Facebook | Instagram

Label: Born Losers Records – Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website

The Sound of Animals Fighting is:
– Rich Balling (vocals, keyboard)
– Anthony Green (vocals)
– Matt Embree (guitar, vocals)
– Chris Tsagakis (drums)
– Steve Choi (guitar, keyboard)
– Matthew Kelly (vocals, guitar)
– Keith Goodwin (vocals)
– Jonathan Hischke (bass)

1. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I haven’t written many post-hardcore articles. I only just started here, guys. ↩︎
2. Fight me, “emo” purists. ↩︎
3. “Act II: All Is Ash Or The Light Shining Through It” off of this album is a masterpiece which I cannot recommend highly enough. Rich Balling’s lyrics directly reference the poem “Anorexic” by modern Irish poet Eavan Boland. ↩︎
4. On his early lyrics, Anthony Green said in a recent interview with The Needle Drop, “it was just word salad — throwing stuff in. Maybe the chorus was about something, maybe the verse was about something else. Back then, I was just trying to sound as much like Cedric from At the Drive-In as I possibly could.” So, interpret with caution. ↩︎
5. …after the thirty-second “Intro”, which features a recitation in Persian of the poem “In the Desert” by Stephen Crane, the English text of which I’ve reprinted here because I think it’s sick as fuck
   
   In the desert
   I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
   Who, squatting upon the ground,
   Held his heart in his hands,
   And ate of it.
   I said, “Is it good, friend?”
   “It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
   
   “But I like it
   “Because it is bitter,
   “And because it is my heart.”
   ↩︎
6. This might be the track Anthony Green is talking about in that same The Needle Drop interview: “Matt Embree, who produced it, put a lot of [my different melodies, with different lyrics] on top of each other, all happening at the same time. I was like, ‘That’s cool.'” ↩︎
7. …in their ears? ↩︎