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DEATHCRASH
Somersaults (untitled (recs))
Add date: 3.3.2026
Release date: 2.27.2026
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untitled (recs)
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London-based slowcore/ post-rock quartet deathcrash – comprising Tiernan Banks, Matthew Weinberger, Noah Bennett, and Patrick Fitzgerald – has always had an affinity for building worlds only to crush them. From their breakout EP, People thought my windows were stars (2021), through two critically acclaimed studio albums, Return (2022) and Less (2023), they have been both the architects and the destroyers, the creationists and the ones manning the flood barrier.
On their third album, Somersaults – due for release 27th February via untitled (recs) – deathcrash’s togetherness as a band has never sounded so fundamental to their work. It’s a sound that carries the weight of a near decade of friendship pushed to its extremes – its trust, its experience, its vulnerability – with no joy or discomfort omitted. Here, they are resolutely the same band that they’ve always been – a downed-tools four-piece of vocals, guitar, bass and drums, writing songs at the outer limits of expression.
The emotional idealism come do-or-die fatalism that’s defined the last eight years of the band has always been found in the recorded subtleties: the quiet sounds bedded beneath their sadnesses, the doom-adjacent noise-upon-noise approach to despair. When their music had been sad, it needed you to break down at its feet and weep; if it had been bleak, it needed you to fall numb at its feet. When Leonard Cohen urged writers not to make their voice weigh less than an ounce when they spoke about butterflies, deathcrash closed their eyes and jerked their heads to one side when they talked about death.
But these confines of perfectionism started to wear thin when touring Less. Opening for the Jesus and Mary Chain over the course of a few months in Europe, playing to more people than they had ever played to before, they realised the art of being less guarded over their sound. Growing into the bigger rooms, they found a freedom in not being tour guides of their own emotion, lowering the yellow umbrella at the front of the pack, dropping the audience member’s hand, and not scanning faces in search of the correct response. Their music didn’t need to be whispered to be fragile, and didn’t need to be detonated to be raging.
They started to write and experiment with new songs on the road. “It’s not that we were trying to move away from any bleakness,” Weinberger promises, “but we were having a great time on tour, and the new songs kind of reflected that.” The results were brighter, more confident – their equivalent of Mark Linkous religiously replaying early records by The Kinks to relocate the core of his songwriting, loosening and unlearning who he’d become (an album which posthumously became Sparklehorse’s Bird Machine).
By the time deathcrash started recording what they’d written, their existentialism was married with enjoyment and purpose, spending four days at Black Box studio in the Loire Valley, with wine, baguettes and sunshine. For an album still riddled with anxieties, there’s an undeniable joy that’s settled deep below the surface.
Thematically, Somersaults began to deal with a more discreet, more complicated, second “coming of age” period – nestled somewhere in the shadows of a Saturn return, not profound enough for its own cosmic undertones nor exultant enough for Jungian philosophy. It’s embarrassed and it’s ordinary. But where the cartography of a coming-of-age story maps out a start and an end, the full-stop is dishonest, and rarely confronts the grief that comes next if life still hasn’t worked out as expected post-adolescence. Somersaults soundtracks the bright-lighted firsts calcifying into memory, and the wide-eyed undulations of youth furrowing. But all of its bleakness is pragmatic, and its mere existence shimmers with an everyday euphoria.
“Thirty, no career, it fucking worries me / And doing the band doesn’t help,” Banks sings in "NYC". But “This life is the best life,” he finishes in "CMC" on top of the ambient white noise from an office printer, thankful that the band is still there, “still making noise in the doorway.” Musical abstractions jettison the same way sunlight might catch the broken glass of a ransacked liquor store. Within those prisms are songs crafted from real hurt, but reflect beautifully.
“There is something about this album that's a reflection on growing up, or a shift from adolescence to adulthood,” Banks explains. “That doesn't feel like a very interesting thing to say artistically, but I think there was this do or die fatalism in our previous music that doesn’t exist here. Adolescence is feeling like you're gonna live forever, but also that you want to die right now – and they're basically the same feeling. And then growing up is somewhere much more in the middle. It’s less exciting, but it's more sustainable. It’s like losing the idealisation of the beginning stages of a relationship – you and them against the world – and being sad that it’s gone, but also – thank God. Because what you now have is real.”
“I think this record has joy in it,” adds Weinberger. “There was definitely joy in making it. There was a joke in the studio that some bits should feel like an eagle soaring. I think that's why “this life is the best life” – that line from "CMC" – is a big tagline of the record for us, you know. All the songs are instances of us just trying to get to that feeling. Some songs are a bit more anxious, like "NYC", some songs are more nostalgic, like "Somersaults". But I think they all roughly circle that idea that this is the life we have, and we’re embracing that life. This record is the corollary of all our doubts.”
Its ten tracks are more vocal heavy than any of deathcrash’s catalogue to date, but lyrically, Somersaults resists revelation. For all its abrasion, phrases appear half-swallowed, broken off at the edge of meaning, consumed by the smaller textures of living – the flickers of light you only notice after you’ve stayed somewhere long enough for the shadows to shift. Ideas that start in one song finish three songs later, and splinters reappear. Cathartic builds are muddied with tenderness, from the freeform rehearsal fragments of "Bella" to the thundering outro of "The Thing You Did" – Fitzgerald’s bass a heavy grounding, Bennett’s drums an exhausted but determined heartbeat grasping for moments of air.
Finished at Haggerston’s Holy Mountain Studio, there are still plenty of instants where deathcrash bow to their role as caretakers of Duster, Low, and Codeine’s slowcore lineage – songs scud to a narcotic crawl, sound monolithic and inwards before spotlighting a crystalline stillness. But more so than before, even the silence feels collaborative – a gesture of communal trust – friends making room for each other’s ghosts. The bridge in "Love for M" is the record at its deepest – “I don’t know if I’ll die at all / I’m not sure if I want to” – but it cuts out to Weinberger’s voice commenting casually on the studio take: “that’s good!” It’s almost funny.
In its higher registers, Banks’s voice would even sound at home in a less whimsical The Wave Pictures. “But we just desperately want to be an emo band,” he insists, delighting that a record store owner above the studio wandered downstairs one day, heard their recordings, and asked, “fucking hell, who made Weezer sad?” Weezer, of course, are already a sad band. But there's a cheesiness to these evocations of being young; there’s a cheesiness to talking it out, and leaving it all on the floor when the red “recording” button flashes. There’s a cheesiness to the word Somersaults, to the lump of excitement in the pit of your stomach, churning like a cement mixer. “And if you don’t land it,” Weinberger points out, “it just fucking hurts, doesn’t it?”
Within that cheesiness is an intimacy and tenderness that’s never troubled deathcrash’s work before. And when all the fat is cut from an album’s narrative – this, a long-winded attempt to understand what the band has spent the last couple of years writing about – it’s best just said that Somersaults is a document of four people tumbling forward, and landing the jump.
Photo Credit: Kaye Song, St. Teilo, Matthew Weinberger
Apple Music
Bandcamp
Spotify
Tidal
untitled (recs)
YouTube
London-based slowcore/ post-rock quartet deathcrash – comprising Tiernan Banks, Matthew Weinberger, Noah Bennett, and Patrick Fitzgerald – has always had an affinity for building worlds only to crush them. From their breakout EP, People thought my windows were stars (2021), through two critically acclaimed studio albums, Return (2022) and Less (2023), they have been both the architects and the destroyers, the creationists and the ones manning the flood barrier.
On their third album, Somersaults – due for release 27th February via untitled (recs) – deathcrash’s togetherness as a band has never sounded so fundamental to their work. It’s a sound that carries the weight of a near decade of friendship pushed to its extremes – its trust, its experience, its vulnerability – with no joy or discomfort omitted. Here, they are resolutely the same band that they’ve always been – a downed-tools four-piece of vocals, guitar, bass and drums, writing songs at the outer limits of expression.
The emotional idealism come do-or-die fatalism that’s defined the last eight years of the band has always been found in the recorded subtleties: the quiet sounds bedded beneath their sadnesses, the doom-adjacent noise-upon-noise approach to despair. When their music had been sad, it needed you to break down at its feet and weep; if it had been bleak, it needed you to fall numb at its feet. When Leonard Cohen urged writers not to make their voice weigh less than an ounce when they spoke about butterflies, deathcrash closed their eyes and jerked their heads to one side when they talked about death.
But these confines of perfectionism started to wear thin when touring Less. Opening for the Jesus and Mary Chain over the course of a few months in Europe, playing to more people than they had ever played to before, they realised the art of being less guarded over their sound. Growing into the bigger rooms, they found a freedom in not being tour guides of their own emotion, lowering the yellow umbrella at the front of the pack, dropping the audience member’s hand, and not scanning faces in search of the correct response. Their music didn’t need to be whispered to be fragile, and didn’t need to be detonated to be raging.
They started to write and experiment with new songs on the road. “It’s not that we were trying to move away from any bleakness,” Weinberger promises, “but we were having a great time on tour, and the new songs kind of reflected that.” The results were brighter, more confident – their equivalent of Mark Linkous religiously replaying early records by The Kinks to relocate the core of his songwriting, loosening and unlearning who he’d become (an album which posthumously became Sparklehorse’s Bird Machine).
By the time deathcrash started recording what they’d written, their existentialism was married with enjoyment and purpose, spending four days at Black Box studio in the Loire Valley, with wine, baguettes and sunshine. For an album still riddled with anxieties, there’s an undeniable joy that’s settled deep below the surface.
Thematically, Somersaults began to deal with a more discreet, more complicated, second “coming of age” period – nestled somewhere in the shadows of a Saturn return, not profound enough for its own cosmic undertones nor exultant enough for Jungian philosophy. It’s embarrassed and it’s ordinary. But where the cartography of a coming-of-age story maps out a start and an end, the full-stop is dishonest, and rarely confronts the grief that comes next if life still hasn’t worked out as expected post-adolescence. Somersaults soundtracks the bright-lighted firsts calcifying into memory, and the wide-eyed undulations of youth furrowing. But all of its bleakness is pragmatic, and its mere existence shimmers with an everyday euphoria.
“Thirty, no career, it fucking worries me / And doing the band doesn’t help,” Banks sings in "NYC". But “This life is the best life,” he finishes in "CMC" on top of the ambient white noise from an office printer, thankful that the band is still there, “still making noise in the doorway.” Musical abstractions jettison the same way sunlight might catch the broken glass of a ransacked liquor store. Within those prisms are songs crafted from real hurt, but reflect beautifully.
“There is something about this album that's a reflection on growing up, or a shift from adolescence to adulthood,” Banks explains. “That doesn't feel like a very interesting thing to say artistically, but I think there was this do or die fatalism in our previous music that doesn’t exist here. Adolescence is feeling like you're gonna live forever, but also that you want to die right now – and they're basically the same feeling. And then growing up is somewhere much more in the middle. It’s less exciting, but it's more sustainable. It’s like losing the idealisation of the beginning stages of a relationship – you and them against the world – and being sad that it’s gone, but also – thank God. Because what you now have is real.”
“I think this record has joy in it,” adds Weinberger. “There was definitely joy in making it. There was a joke in the studio that some bits should feel like an eagle soaring. I think that's why “this life is the best life” – that line from "CMC" – is a big tagline of the record for us, you know. All the songs are instances of us just trying to get to that feeling. Some songs are a bit more anxious, like "NYC", some songs are more nostalgic, like "Somersaults". But I think they all roughly circle that idea that this is the life we have, and we’re embracing that life. This record is the corollary of all our doubts.”
Its ten tracks are more vocal heavy than any of deathcrash’s catalogue to date, but lyrically, Somersaults resists revelation. For all its abrasion, phrases appear half-swallowed, broken off at the edge of meaning, consumed by the smaller textures of living – the flickers of light you only notice after you’ve stayed somewhere long enough for the shadows to shift. Ideas that start in one song finish three songs later, and splinters reappear. Cathartic builds are muddied with tenderness, from the freeform rehearsal fragments of "Bella" to the thundering outro of "The Thing You Did" – Fitzgerald’s bass a heavy grounding, Bennett’s drums an exhausted but determined heartbeat grasping for moments of air.
Finished at Haggerston’s Holy Mountain Studio, there are still plenty of instants where deathcrash bow to their role as caretakers of Duster, Low, and Codeine’s slowcore lineage – songs scud to a narcotic crawl, sound monolithic and inwards before spotlighting a crystalline stillness. But more so than before, even the silence feels collaborative – a gesture of communal trust – friends making room for each other’s ghosts. The bridge in "Love for M" is the record at its deepest – “I don’t know if I’ll die at all / I’m not sure if I want to” – but it cuts out to Weinberger’s voice commenting casually on the studio take: “that’s good!” It’s almost funny.
In its higher registers, Banks’s voice would even sound at home in a less whimsical The Wave Pictures. “But we just desperately want to be an emo band,” he insists, delighting that a record store owner above the studio wandered downstairs one day, heard their recordings, and asked, “fucking hell, who made Weezer sad?” Weezer, of course, are already a sad band. But there's a cheesiness to these evocations of being young; there’s a cheesiness to talking it out, and leaving it all on the floor when the red “recording” button flashes. There’s a cheesiness to the word Somersaults, to the lump of excitement in the pit of your stomach, churning like a cement mixer. “And if you don’t land it,” Weinberger points out, “it just fucking hurts, doesn’t it?”
Within that cheesiness is an intimacy and tenderness that’s never troubled deathcrash’s work before. And when all the fat is cut from an album’s narrative – this, a long-winded attempt to understand what the band has spent the last couple of years writing about – it’s best just said that Somersaults is a document of four people tumbling forward, and landing the jump.
Photo Credit: Kaye Song, St. Teilo, Matthew Weinberger