Style: Post-hardcore, swancore, progressive rock (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: The Mars Volta, Circa Survive, Dance Gavin Dance
Country: United States
Release date: 24 October 2025

---

What do shopping malls, Monster energy drinks and post-hardcore have in common? They all strike me as thoroughly American. Brash, overstimulating, and lacking in subtlety, they promise more than you need and deliver it at full volume. Post-hardcore is a style of music that wears its heart on its sleeve and dares you to love it or leave it.

Californian five-piece Hail the Sun exemplify this unapologetic, punk-rooted panache, while tinkering with the dials on progressive and math rock influences. The resulting sound comes fully charged with an angsty melodicism that’s fresh and fun, but could also slot into the soundtrack of MTV’s 2009 hit reality competition show The Challenge: The Ruins alongside Circa Survive or Dance Gavin Dance without missing a beat.

cut.turn.fade.back, Hail the Sun’s seventh album, detonates on impact. Opener “The Drooling Class” sets a dauntingly high bar with synthy, addictive melodies, punchily serrated guitars, and a key change so perfectly timed to make you throw your fist in the air that it’s basically cheating. Above the fray, vocalist Donovan Melero rides the blast with an urgency that matches the track’s manic momentum. And speaking of the vocals, it wouldn’t be post-hardcore if they weren’t kind of polarizing. Across cut.turn.fade.back’s forty-three minutes, Melero pleads, preaches, and occasionally—I’ll say it—whines in a melodramatic high tenor that’s reminiscent of Circa Survive’s Anthony Green, coloured by a chewy California accent and dashes of shrieking harshes that lend the album a sawtooth edge, an effective texture that the album could stand to lean on more heavily.

Thematically true to the band’s punk ancestry, cut.turn.fade.back’s lyrics explore politics and pining, revolutions and relationships. It might be the system, it might be the heart, but something’s always broken. The aforementioned brass-necked Americanness is baked into the album’s lyrical folklore, as “a sad Texas sky” and “the cold Massachusetts air” function as geographic shorthand for the restless disillusionment the band embodies. It’s a mixed bag; if you can dodge whiplash from the shifting personal and political themes, you’ll still have to contend with the white knight vibes of the domestic abuse narrative in “Insensitive Tempo” and sidestep the cringe potential of Melero’s repeated cries of “I hate to love the way it hurts” in “Relapse Is A Love Affair”. But that’s part and parcel of post-hardcore. Who among us doesn’t have a little angst? The themes are timelessly relatable—or so I surmised at a recent Hail the Sun live show while surrounded by teenagers screaming along with the lyrics, an experience which made me feel more or less geriatric.

In addition to his spirited delivery behind the mic, Melero also splits drumming duties with Allen Casillas¹, both bringing a kinetically-charged energy to the restless, athletically prog-tinged metre shifts on cut.turn.fade.back. Guitarists Shane Gann and Aric Garcia bring equal vitality, with standout moments such as the phaser-like zing on “Insensitive Tempo, or “I Can Tell By The Scars”, where the guitar careens across the stereo field before skyrocketing into a soaring, liquid solo at 2:30. cut.turn.fade.back ends as strong as it starts with the catchily caustic “War Crimes,” though maintaining that momentum throughout the album proves difficult. “Blight” opens with rock’n’roll swagger and blistering harsh vocals but trails off like an unfinished sentence, and “Building Code” feels like a less inspired echo of “I Can Tell by the Scars”; you could slot one’s chorus into the other without even noticing.

When Hail the Sun get it right, they’re a study in compelling excess, not unlike America itself, though this excess is emotional rather than material. Their most unrestrained moments—overdramatic vocal outpourings, guitar hooks that lodge themselves directly in your brain—are also their most irresistible. cut.turn.fade.back may wobble in its pacing and heavy-handed lyrics, but it still burns with the explosive energy of a band unwilling to play it cool, and it’s hard not to admire the conviction. Subtlety was never really an option.

---

Recommended tracks: The Drooling Class, Blight, War Crimes
You may also like: Benthos, El Moono, Without Waves, Satyr, Twenty Below, Resilia, Colorbred, House of Leaves, Cascadent
Final verdict: 6.5/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Label: Equal Vision Records

Hail the Sun is:
– Donovan Melero (vocals, drums, percussion)
– Shane Gann (guitars, backing vocals)
– Aric Garcia (guitars)
– John Stirrat (bass)
– Allen Casillas (drums)

1.  A setup that sees Melero occasionally taking over on drums during Hail the Sun’s live shows. ↩︎