Balance and Composure regretted breaking up from the moment they said goodbye. Inner-band tension and exhaustion led to the band ceasing activity in early 2018, but when they stepped on stage at their 2019 farewell shows with new drummer Dennis Wilson (ex-Saves The Day), the band’s original spark was reignited. “We were like, ‘Wait, we’re having so much fun.’ We completely forgot about that,” vocalist Jon Simmons reflects. “So as we were playing these shows we were like, ‘Damn, really? We’re done?'”
Any possibility of walking back their decision to call it quits disappeared when COVID hit just months after the farewell shows, but as the world started opening back up, the members of Balance and Composure started getting together again, just because they missed playing together. They had no concrete plan or vision, but they quickly realized they all had some ideas for new music, so they started coming up with new songs for the first time in years. About six months later, their longtime producer Will Yip heard the material they’d been working on, and he encouraged them to write a new record.
The members of Balance and Composure have families and “real jobs” these days, so finding time to get in the studio wasn’t easy, but they slowly but surely started convening at Studio 4 and laying down the new material. By 2023, they were ready to play some shows, and they announced their return alongside the release of the first two songs they finished with Will, “Savior Mode” and “Last to Know.” “We didn’t wanna come back without new music,” Jon says. “We didn’t want it to seem like a cash grab or anything like that, because that’s not what it’s for. We just wanted to make music again. That was the most important thing.”
Balance and Composure were pretty instantly met with a warm welcome from their still-strong fanbase, and now, 18 months later, they’re back with their first new album in eight years, With You In Spirit. It doesn’t include “Savior Mode” or “Last to Know” (“I don’t think they belong on the record,” Jon says), but it does include ten songs that mark a focused, cohesive, thrilling return from one of the most beloved underground rock bands of the last 15 years.
With You In Spirit follows 2016’s Light We Made, a refreshing departure that explored Kid A-style art rock and R&B-infused falsettos after two consecutive albums of maximalist grungy post-hardcore, but which was also a divisive album that contributed to the band’s demise. A noticeable amount of longtime fans were confused by the new direction, and Jon has said that the response to the album was also negatively impacted by Balance’s then-new label home of Vagrant Records failing to deliver on multiple promises that they made to the band. “They made some post on their social media, and that was it,” he told Stereogum in 2019. “We weren’t in one store, we weren’t promoted besides their social media posts, we felt completely forgotten.”
Making that record took a toll on the band as well. Jon said during a 2022 interview on the Vagrant Records: 25 Years on the Street podcast that their former drummer Bailey Van Ellis took the reigns on most of Light We Made in a way that ended up putting tension between him and the other members of the band. “It used to be pretty collaborative and he got kind of controlling,” Jon says. “He wouldn’t really hear any other ideas… he was very difficult.” Making this new album with Dennis, Jon says, was “like night and day.”
“When I look back on Light We Made, that was a really unfun… it wasn’t the best time recording,” he says. “We made it our mission to make [With You In Spirit] the opposite experience: making it really fun, and we wanted everybody to be heard. We wanted to make sure everyone liked everything.”
The result is an album that sounds like the culmination of everything Balance and Composure have ever done, along with some hints of where they might go next. As much as Light We Made left what Jon calls a “dark cloud” over the band’s heads, it was also a creative triumph, and With You In Spirit picks up where the ever-adventurous band left off. At the same time, it incorporates the heavier side of Balance’s beloved earlier records Separation (2011) and The Things We Think We’re Missing (2013), allowing the band to embrace what comes most naturally to them instead of making a conscious effort to shy away from it. It sounds like a more refreshed, mature version of the Balance and Composure that you know and love. It’s such an ideal reunion album that it doesn’t really feel like a “reunion album” at all; it makes the eight years between Light We Made and With You In Spirit feel like nothing.
Embracing their most natural tendencies meant leaning into the trademark Balance and Composure sound, an artsy offshoot of post-hardcore that’s long taken cues from bands like mewithoutYou, Manchester Orchestra, and Sunny Day Real Estate. Lyrically though, Jon took inspiration from some artists who he really started latching onto in the time since Balance first slowed down. “Mitski helped me a lot with lyrics and going for it a little bit more than I used to,” he says. “When Phoebe Bridgers’ record came out too, lyrically I was like, ‘Okay I have to like, dive in.’ I’ve always felt like I was a little vague in the past to protect myself and what the stuff means to me. It kind of gave me courage to go for it and dig a little deeper.”
As Jon dug in, the themes he began to explore on this record included “family struggles, preemptive grief, and a lot of self-reflection, especially on how I react to things that happen.” Because the album includes material he’s written as far back as 2019, the growth he’s felt himself experience over the past few years is captured throughout this album. The title track “With You In Spirit,” for example, was written in reaction to Jon witnessing his mother struggle with lung cancer and wishing he’d handled the situation better, and the song “A Little of Myself” captures the different ways in which he dealt with his father’s struggles with ALS later on.
“I was living in LA, and [my mom] was in Pennsylvania, and I couldn’t really bear the news. I couldn’t accept that it was happening,” Jon says. “I felt like a bad brother to all my sisters who were helping out my mom, I felt like a bad son, and I just couldn’t take the weight of it because my mom is like my best friend. I just like shut down and just became like a shell of a human. I wasn’t present, and that really bothered me, how I handled that.”
“What I noticed when I wrote the song ‘A Little of Myself’–my mom is okay, she beat lung cancer and it’s great, I’m grateful–but my dad, who I was never close with, has ALS, and he’s like on his last leg of life. That’s what ‘A Little of Myself’ is about. I noticed after the record was done how I completely shifted when my dad got sick, and I had learned from my mom being sick. I was like, I have to be there for my dad, even though we’re not close, I have to do all that I can to be there with him, try to spark a relationship with him, and just do everything I can to help him.”
“I feel like I’ve changed in a way, or maybe I was just embarrassed about how I handled my mom’s situation, but I feel like I’ve been doing the opposite with my dad, and it’s been good. We’ve established some kind of connection, and we have a little bit of a relationship now. That’s definitely something I noticed post-record. I’m like, oh the correlation between ‘With You In Spirit’ and ‘A Little of Myself,’ there was growth.”
Jon’s lyrics in Balance and Composure have always been sincere, but they’ve never mirrored his thoughts in the deeply honest way that they do on this album. And, when it came to making a reunion album, maintaining and even increasing that aspect of his songwriting was one of the biggest pressures he put on himself. “I feel like a lot of bands who reunite, or are on their fifth or sixth or seventh records, phone it in, and it just becomes like a job and it’s kind of void of emotion and heart,” Jon says. “I try to do the opposite of that. I wanted to spill as much of myself and ourselves as we could into this thing.”
That goal, and every goal Balance set for themselves on this record, was an internal one, and that marked a difference from the way Balance approached new albums in the past. “I basically learned that everything you think really matters doesn’t really matter,” Jon says. “The things I would stress about on tour and everything… I just don’t really care anymore about the stupid shit, I don’t care about being on the radio. I think I fully realized I’m just lucky enough to be able to make music that at least a handful of people want to listen to and come to see us at shows, and that’s fine with me. I am grateful for that. And that’s really what it’s all about. I don’t care about growth anymore. If it happens, that’s great; if it doesn’t, fine.”
“We were always chasing something,” he adds, “the next thing: get your band bigger, get more people to hear you, and I kind of just want to enjoy myself and get to express myself in music and have an outlet, period.”
Even the decision to release the album on Will Yip’s own Memory Music label allowed the band to focus on what they care about most–the music–and tune out the rest. “I love how easy it was; we didn’t have to talk to a single label,” Jon laughs. “There’s nothing I hate more than talking to labels and getting the fake promises that never happen, and then you just end up owing them money.”
On the eve of the album’s release, Balance will begin a headlining fall tour with support from Kevin Devine & the Goddamn Band and MILLY in Brooklyn at Warsaw (10/3) (moved from Brooklyn Paramount), and then they play Manchester Orchestra‘s annual Thanksgiving show The Stuffing in Atlanta and Run For Cover’s 20th anniversary Something in the Way festival. After that, their future is undecided. But they want to write more music, and “already have tons of ideas,” and Jon doesn’t foresee the band putting the nail back in the coffin the way they did in 2019.
“I don’t think we’re going to break up ever again officially, because that was cruel, to me, and to the fans,” he says. “I think we’re just going to take it opportunity by opportunity.”
