EPs

EP Review: Still Remains – Spirit Breaker

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Posted on 1 hour ago

10 min read

Review by Rick Eaglestone for MPM

Still Remains, Grand Rapids-born, formed in 2002 out of the remnants of local hardcore acts Shades of Amber and Unition, a band whose keyboard-weighted approach to metalcore set them apart from their American peers from the first note of their 2005 Roadrunner debut have been operating in conspicuous silence for thirteen years.

Of Love and Lunacy announced something different in the early-2000s scene: the atmospheric density of the keyboards, the dual-vocal dynamic between T.J. Miller and Mike Church, the melodic architecture that owed as much to the European melodic metal tradition as to the American hardcore scene it emerged from. The Serpent in 2007 deepened that identity; Ceasing to Breathe in 2013, funded directly by the fan base through a Kickstarter campaign, proved the audience was still there and still invested. And then, quiet. Not dissolution, just the accumulated weight of adult lives, family commitments, and the sheer difficulty of sustaining heavy music when the infrastructure no longer carries you. Spirit Breaker, their first new material since that 2013 comeback.

T.J. Miller has described Spirit Breaker as the most personal and emotional record the band has made from a lyrical standpoint, and that framing is not promotional language. The five tracks do not trade in the genre’s habitual abstractions. They address grief, dependency, the weight of accumulated failure, and the exhaustion of performing a version of yourself that the world requires but that you no longer recognise. That Albrecht, whose production work with Hollow Front and Of Virtue has shown consistent sympathy for bands navigating exactly this kind of emotional territory.

The Wound and the Weapon opens the EP with a statement that could not have been made by a band approaching this cautiously. Inviting Guy Kozowyk of The Red Chord into the opening track announces intent immediately. This is not a band easing back in with something comfortable and hook-forward, but one that has been carrying something for over a decade and has elected to put it down here, at volume, with reinforcements. Kozowyk’s uncompromising aggression and Miller’s emotionally exposed delivery pull in opposite directions across the track, creating a tension that most comeback singles never locate. The guitars are at their most purposeful and the keyboards establish the atmospheric register that has always been Still Remains’ most singular contribution to the form. By the time the track ends, it calls into no doubt that not only that the band is back, but that the years away have cost them nothing of consequence.

If the opening track addresses the subject matter through aggression, the title track approaches it differently, the verses restrained, the dynamic construction patient in a way that makes the eventual release feel proportional rather than manufactured. There is a melodic intelligence at work in the track’s assembly: nothing arrives before the song has made the case for it, and when the heavier passages land, they do so with the weight of something earned. Zach Roth’s keyboard work, which carries the atmospheric quality that has distinguished Still Remains from their Michigan contemporaries across their entire catalogue, operates here with particular clarity.

Erase You delivers the kind of hook that requires no second listen to locate. It is the track that will reach those encountering Still Remains for the first time, and the one that will remind those who have followed since Of Love and Lunacy exactly why they invested the attention. What distinguishes Eclipse is not novelty of theme but quality of execution: the arrangement is careful, the dynamics handled with a precision that prevents the track from collapsing under its own seriousness, and the vocal performances carry the weight of lyrics that might otherwise read as familiar. In the context of an EP that wears its emotional stakes openly, Eclipse functions as a structural pivot a moment of inward focus between the kinetic energy surrounding.

Waste of Breath closes the EP with a track that, more than anything else on Spirit Breaker, reaches back toward the melodic and atmospheric depth that gave Of Love and Lunacy its distinctive character in 2005. The keyboards are at their fullest range here, establishing a sonic environment with the weight and space that the band’s best material has always inhabited. That this quality arrives as the closing statement is either deliberate sequencing or instinct and given the care evident across the EP it is almost certainly both. Waste of Breath ends Spirit Breaker not with a declaration about the future but with a summation of what this band has always been — the layered atmosphere, the dual-vocal architecture, the keyboards accomplishing what no other instrument in the arrangement could. It is the right ending, and it leaves the right question unanswered: what comes next.

The question any comeback record must answer is not whether the band can still play but whether they have found a reason to play that is worth the listener’s attention. Spirit Breaker answers it without equivocation. The Grand Rapids metalcore scene that shaped Still Remains produced a generation of bands who understood that weaving European melodic and atmospheric influences into American metalcore could make it something more expansive than its immediate surroundings. Very few of those bands are still doing it with any conviction. Still Remains, it turns out, are.