Jeremy Bolm says the four years since Touché Amoré released Lament have been about “finding the middle ground between excitement and disappointment.” The album came out in October of 2020, seven months into the COVID-induced global lockdown, and for the first time in Touché Amoré’s decade-plus-long career, they couldn’t get out there and perform any of the new songs. But, when they were finally able to return to the stage at the first rebooted edition of Furnace Fest in late September of 2021–almost exactly a year since Lament had come out–Jeremy says he’d never been more excited to be in a band.
“It was so fulfilling to start a set with ‘Come Heroine’ and have the audience yell it back,” he says of the Lament opener that made its live debut at that show. “It was the most fulfilling feeling, and I think some of my favorite memories of being in a band have stemmed from all the shows we’ve played since then.”
They went directly from Furnace Fest into a tour opening for Thrice, and I remember thinking at the Terminal 5 show in NYC how much of a cathartic release it felt for the band and crowd alike. In 2022, they finally went on their first headlining tour behind Lament, and they used their veteran platform to take out a handful of bands that have been shaping punk and hardcore’s next generation, including Scowl, Militarie Gun, Vein.fm, Thirdface, Closer, and Gleemer. They supported old friends The Menzingers and Deafheaven as they celebrated the 10th anniversaries of On the Impossible Past and Sunbather, respectively; they helped mewithoutYou say goodbye; and, in 2023, they played their four most recent albums in full across two LA shows that celebrated the band’s 15th anniversary. (And before it sounds like they neglected …To the Beat of a Dead Horse, don’t forget they played that one in full for its 10th anniversary on one of their last tours before COVID and re-recorded it with their current/longtime lineup as Dead Horse X that same year.)
“To do these anniversary shows where it’s like we’re playing Parting the Sea and then we’re also playing Lament and then having the same kids sing along to both records, that’s something that I think our band has always taken pride in,” Jeremy says. “You can’t put a price on that. I think the the biggest point of pride for me personally is that how much of a divisive conversation it is amongst people who like our band of ranking our records… It’s really cool to see, especially for a band within our genre. A lot of times people feel like as bands go on there’s a lot of diminishing returns, so the fact that we’ve been able to maintain something has felt really gratifying.”
If you’ve seen Touché in the past few years, you probably know exactly what Jeremy’s talking about. The fans go hard for every era of their career, and the band does too. They’re one of those bands where every single album brings something uniquely important to the table, so it makes sense that there’s never really been a consensus ranking amongst fans and critics of their catalog. It’s been all about the big picture, all about striking a balance between steady growth and not forgetting your roots, and it’s with that energy that Touché went into their sixth album, Spiral In A Straight Line.
The new album has some of the fastest, most aggressive songs that Touché Amoré have written in years, like “Disasters,” “Mezzanine,” and “Finalist,” and it also pushes the band forward into places they’ve never gone. Underlying acoustic guitars frequently populate the album, and guitarists Clayton Stevens and Nick Steinhardt craft patterns and chord changes that sound miles away from punk and hardcore, successfully shoehorned into that realm when blended with Tyler Kirby and Elliot Babin’s furious rhythm section and Jeremy’s unmistakable shout. It’s striking yet not surprising that Touché’s playlist of songs that inspired this album includes the likes of Duran Duran, Galaxie 500, Prefab Sprout, Arab Strap, Waxahatchee, and Fontaines D.C., along with almost no aggressive music. “That’s our band in a nutshell,” Jeremy says. “It was fun to put that list together because it just shows the wide range of stuff that gets listened to… I think the bands that we can all agree on are Envy, Converge, Jimmy Eat World, and Death Cab, I think that might be the four bands that we all like. And it’s interesting ’cause if you put all those bands in a blender, it probably sounds like Touché.”
When friends would ask Jeremy what the new music sounded like as they were working on Spiral In A Straight Line, he’d reply that it feels like “a meeting ground between Stage Four and Parting the Sea,” and he says that’s mostly just a result of the headspace they were in from playing so many career-spanning sets, rather than any attempt to recapture some sort of nostalgia. It sounds like an album that was very natural for Touché to make, one where they sound so firmly in their comfort zone that the songs are destined to leave an instant impact on longtime fans. The vast range of influences also makes it the band’s most genre-defying album yet, and when they’re bridging the gap between classic pop balladry and fast-paced hardcore on a song like “Hal Ashby,” they do it in a way that sounds like second nature.
The title Spiral In A Straight Line, which comes from a lyric in “Altitude,” echoes the overarching theme of the album, which Jeremy says is “just this idea of the sort of overwhelming dread and and discomfort that comes with life changes, that comes with just the stresses that we all feel every single day,” and how “there’s sort of this need to put on airs and act like everything is okay, because we have people that we have to show up for, or there’s just a job that has to be done that day.”
“So the idea of spiraling in a straight line is like, we’re all sort of spiraling in the same way, but we’re having to walk this straight line to, I guess just power through it.”
As Jeremy navigates these everyday struggles, he dishes out one-liners that are up there with the best in Touché’s catalog: “I’ll try anything if it’ll course correct me” (“Hal Ashby”), “I’ve been driving for over half my life and I’ve had a few close calls” (“Force of Habit”), “I’m bad at taking photos of the people I love the most/I just think they’ll always be there, when we all know that they won’t” (“This Routine”), and “I have to make this count, so I can put it all to rest and not leave you in suspense” (“Finalist”), to name four. Even on a lyrical level it can feel like a cross between Parting the Sea and Stage Four, with the theatrical narration of the former and the deeply personal specifics of the latter. One song in particular, “The Glue,” was inspired by this year being the 10th anniversary of Jeremy’s mother’s death, which informed the entirety of Stage Four. It’s “about the ways in which I feel I was given the responsibility of kind of keeping my family together, keeping us all intact basically, and the ways in which I feel that hasn’t ended up as well as it could have,” he says. “In a way,” he adds, “a lot of the record is about dynamics after a loss.”
Spiral In A Straight Line opens with one of the most punchy, catchy songs the band have ever written, “Nobody’s,” which finds Jeremy embracing his more melodic side, and which sounds like it’ll be a fan favorite at shows for the remainder of this band’s existence. But, for an album that opens on such an instantly-satisfying note, it saves its most breathtaking moments for the end. “The Glue” is the penultimate track, and when Jeremy shouts “I’ve done what I can to be the glue/there’s no longer connection, just residue” over a suspenseful, half-time backdrop, it’s hard to imagine not getting goosebumps. That song is sandwiched in between the album’s two songs with guest vocalists, which also happen to be two of the most monumental songs in the Touché Amoré catalog thus far.
“Subversion (Brand New Love)” is powered by a shimmering post-rock build-up, and it recounts a specific moment when Jeremy was on a flight to Adelaide, listening to one of his all-time favorite songs, Sebadoh’s “Brand New Love,” in his headphones. As the song’s pace picks up, Sebadoh’s (and Dinosaur Jr’s) own Lou Barlow shows up to sing part of that very Sebadoh song in the background of Jeremy’s pained screams. Jeremy calls the collaboration “a top three Touché thing that has ever happened,” and something he still can’t believe actually came to fruition. As explained in more detail below, it came to be after Jeremy wrote Lou “as thoughtful of an email as [he] possibly could” about what he wanted to do, and Lou liked the idea right away.
“It was a very thoughtful use of the song,” Lou says. “I liked it and was flattered. When I’ve guested on vocals before it’s less a creative decision and more of a cameo/name-check. I sensed that they had a vision and could hear my voice in the song and took the extra step to reach out to me. It was easy for me to do which is not really the case in similar things I’ve done. It was very natural.”
The album’s other guest vocalist is the band’s old friend Julien Baker, who appears on closing track “Goodbye For Now.” The song makes Spiral In A Straight Line the third consecutive Touché Amoré album to feature guest vocals from Julien, and this might be their most stunning collaboration yet. It’s the first one that she recorded in person with the band, rather than recording her part remotely, and the way her voice blends with Jeremy’s as he screams “We say goodbye for now and I’ll try to come around” during the climactic coda makes for one of the most bittersweet-sounding moments of Touché’s career.
For a band whose albums are so hard to rank, I don’t know where exactly I’d put Spiral In A Straight Line but I think it’d be somewhere near the top. Its highs–of which there are many–make me feel the way my favorite Touché Amoré songs make me feel. Its sequence makes it an album that can’t be skipped through or turned off early, and an album that makes one unpredictable move after the next. With six albums in a 15-year span, there’s no denying that Touché Amoré are veterans, but they sound as hungry on Spiral In A Straight Line as they did in the early days. It’s too soon to know where they’ll go from here, but I imagine that they’re gonna just keep climbing.
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Spiral In A Straight Line comes out 10/11 via Rise Records (pre-order), and Touché Amoré will begin a headlining tour with Soul Glo, Portrayal of Guilt, and Soft Blue Shimmer two days before that in LA. Their tour includes a return to The Fest for the first time since their 2014 set, the one the band was playing when Jeremy got the voicemail that his mother had passed. It also includes a Brooklyn show on Halloween (10/31) at Warsaw.
Videos and tour dates are below, along with more of my conversation with Jeremy…
This is your second consecutive record with Ross Robinson. What made you want to go back to him and what was different about working within this time?
We knew when we finished Lament that we had to do another one with him, just because it was such a specific experience and his drive and motivation and encouragement is like nothing else in this world. We would have a 13-hour day and I wouldn’t see him look at his phone once. You know? Like he is just in it the whole time and loves the things that anyone else would be like “this is the most tedious shit in the entire world.” He is loving every minute of it, because he’s so dedicated to what this is.
One of the first things he said to me is, “We have to go deeper this time.” So I knew that that meant it’s not gonna be comfortable. Like you would think, “Okay we know how this goes, we know what it’s like to work with Ross, we know what to expect this time, it’s gonna be easier, less intense, less whatever”–no. He turned it up, and it was way harder to make this record on an emotional level and all of that. So yeah, it wasn’t a vacation. It was definitely the hardest record to make just because of how intense most days were. We thank him for it because we know that it means he really, really cares about the process.
How did Lou Barlow end up on the record?
It was the coolest story ever. We were in Australia, we were on tour, and I often do this thing where–I’m not afraid of flying in any capacity, I have to do it enough that it doesn’t really bother me or anything like that–but sometimes if I’m conscious of it, I’ll put on one of my favorite songs. I’ll choose a favorite song at random to listen to you as we’re landing, just in the slight chance that it doesn’t go well as we land. I’m like, hey at least I go out listening to a song that I love. So “Brand New Love” from Sebadoh is in like my top 20 songs of all time, it has been forever. I love the covers of the song that exist; it’s just one of these songs that means a lot to me. So I was listening to that song as were landing in Adelaide, and I realized on that listen, “Oh my god, you can actually sing the chorus of ‘Brand New Love’ over the outro of this song, even though they sound completely different.” I was like, this is haunting how this works, ’cause I just referenced it in this verse.
So I brought it to my band and I was like, “Hey, does this make sense?” ‘Cause I have singer brain, where in my brain I’m like “This makes sense!” but I don’t know if it’s in the right key, I don’t know any of that shit. And those guys were like, “I think it works.” So, we went and demoed it with our buddy Alex Estrada, who recorded Dead Horse–we do all of our pre-pro demos with him, he’s like the sixth member of our band. He has an amazing singing voice, so I was like, “Alex, will you sing this over the outro ’cause you have a much better voice than me? I just want to make sure that this actually makes sense.” He does it, I’m like “Holy shit, this works, it sounds so cool.”
So then we go in to record the record with Ross, and I’m thinking like, “Who could we get to do this?” And then one day I was like, it’s just the most brazen thing in the entire world but I wonder if Lou Barlow would actually do it. I was able to get in touch with him, and I wrote him as thoughtful of an email as I possibly could; I sent him the lyrics, I sent him what I was going through, I sent him the motivation. And he hit me back within a day and was like, “This sounds like a really fun thing to do, I’m down.” I just could not believe it. I mean, for me personally, it’s like a top three Touché thing that has ever happened. I still cannot believe this happened. And our communication was so limited. We only chatted through text a couple times. He was just so kind and gracious with his time to do that for us.
I mean it’s crazy. Like, you start a band, you’re not thinking about who you’ll end up working with or anything like that. And the fact that this song that has been one of my consistent favorite songs for twenty-plus years gets to have this thing on our record of him singing it… I still just can’t believe it happened.
The other guest is Julien Baker, who you’ve now worked with on three consecutive albums. What’s the story behind this one?
We had this empty space in “Goodbye For Now” where it was like, I want something to be there, I don’t know what it is yet. Julien happens to be in California now; every time we’ve worked with her in the past, she’d always just sent in her vocals because she was probably in Nashville or something.
We’d never been able to do anything with her in person, and knowing that she was in LA at the time, I hit her up and I was like, “You have every right to tell me to fuck off, ’cause you’ve done this for us twice now, so do you don’t have to do this, I don’t expect you to do this, I will love you no matter what, we are friends, you don’t have to do this. But, here is the situation, we have this space, let me know if this is anything that interests you.” And she was like, “I’ll be there this week.”
It was really awesome to sit down with her–with lyrics in front of me that I wrote like the night before just because I was like I ‘okay she said she’s down now I have to come up with something’–so to sit next to her and kind of go over it, and hear how she improvised and took that was super cool. And then also to watch her work with Ross was just an experience in and of itself. Ross gave her the Ross treatment too. To watch them interact was also quite an experience.
As much as I call Alex Estrada the sixth member of our band, I call Julien Baker the MVP of our band at this point, with three records in.
Tell me about leaving Epitaph and signing with Rise.
Our contract was up with Epitaph, and I think we’ve just always been a band that likes to try new opportunities every couple years–like if you look at our discography we did two with Deathwish, two with Epitaph. It’s the same thing with producers, we did two with Brad [Wood], two with Ross. It’s just something that continues growth for us.
When we met with Rise, we were very taken back by how enthusiastic they were about everything, and how well they knew the band–just the way in which they approached us in general was really nice, and they made us feel really good about taking the leap. It’s hard to navigate promoting your band in 2024 with social engagement and all that stuff, and they seem to have a completely different worldview than any other label we’d ever been on, and that was exciting to be like: let’s let them cook, and see how that goes.
The upcoming tour is with a very cool assortment of bands: Soul Glo, Portrayal of Guilt, and Soft Blue Shimmer. Can you tell me about putting this one together?
I’ll be candid, booking tours is extremely fucking hard. It’s one of the hardest things our band has… we always feel very much alone in like, is it hard for other people to do this? ‘Cause getting bands is really, really difficult, especially direct bands, because often direct support bands are big enough to just headline on their own, you know? The band that does direct support has to really be down. But we have had this great relationship with Soul Glo; they were kind enough to let me put out some of their records, we love them a lot, and they’re great, and I’m so happy for the success that they’ve seen these last few years. So we had a list of bands and when they were approached, the fact that they said that they were down was super exciting, especially watching them just get better and better live has been really awesome.
We’ve toured with Portrayal of Guilt before–we took them out on tour in Europe; it was us, Deafheaven, and them. I’ve been a fan of them since that first 7″; I think that first 7″ was so exciting when that thing came out–I’m a huge fan of Majority Rule and bands like that, so to hear this band capture that sound and then just to watch their evolution as they’ve experimented into more like death metal stuff and whatever else has just been super cool. And then, we wanted to have a band from California, Soft Blue Shimmer, and we also wanted to have a band that kind of breaks up the aggressiveness of the tour, to start the show on a more beautiful tone, as opposed to just going right into like hyper-aggressive, you know? So I feel like they’re hitting the nail on the head with that one. They’re the one band that I don’t know personally; I’m actually excited to get to know them ’cause they’re super, super good. I think it kind of rounds out the sound of the tour too. I think we like to build tours to where whoever is opening is sort of like, it all melds together into whatever our band sounds like. So it’s like you get the sort of dream-poppy shoegazey leanings with them, and then the hyper-aggressiveness with the rest of the stuff, and then eventually it’s I think an amalgamation of what the hell we are.
You recently did a surprise set at Sound & Fury, a festival that obviously was pretty important to the early days of the band. How was it for you to make a return to that fest?
So fun. It’s such a staple in California. I’m happy that it still exists. We’ve played all different sort of iterations of it from all the different people that have taken over throughout the years; I think we’ve probably done it with each subset of people who run the festival, and they all have their own cool ways in which they curate it. So, to have been able to do it this time–[Sean] Riley, Madison [Woodward, of Fury], and Martin [Stewart, of God’s Hate, Terror, etc] do such a great job, they really care about the people involved and the showgoers in a way that is really special to see. So when we approached them to be like, “Hey, we have this record we’re gonna be announcing”–we were actually supposed to play when the pandemic happened, so it ended up not working out, and then going forward those summers because of timing or whatever else, we weren’t able to do it–so this time around we were like, “You know what, this could be a fun opportunity. Ceremony did a surprise set the year before and that was really special to see and cool to see,” so we’re like, “Hey, we know this works,” so we asked them if they would let us do it and they were really kind about it and let us do it. It was very stressful in the moment; I want to give a big shoutout to the band Anxious for saving our asses, because as soon as we were about to start, Clayton’s entire setup was not working, his pedal board was just not turning on. And to have the band on the previous stage finish and then all attention go to our stage and all of a sudden we can’t make sound was very, uh… and then Anxious, who we do not know personally, came to the rescue and let us use their guitar player’s pedalboard, which is a huge ask for a stranger.
I remember telling Madison, “Maybe have us go after Drug Church but maybe like not right before Sunami or something, just so it sonically makes sense. I don’t want people to be hoping we’re gonna be this ass-beater band and we’re absolutely not.” And he was like, “No, for sure. For sure.” And we ended up being right after Drug Church, which is what we wanted, and right before Sunami [laughs]. So he took both directions and just put us between the two. But I think it was totally fine.
But we did follow Weekend Nachos, who were on the other stage, which is also very not us, but also, that’s the beauty of Sound and Fury. I think that in 2009, the first year we played it, I think that what made us terrified but worked the most to our advantage is–and I’ve told bands throughout the years, like younger bands, all sorts of bands, that I witness being nervous about being on certain bills, being on certain festivals that it is a fucking superpower to be the band that sounds different that day. Because, whether your audience member likes it or not, they’re gonna notice it. ‘Cause if your band sounds one way, and you’re playing between 20 bands that are all like beatdown hardcore bands, whether your audience member likes it or not, they’re gonna notice it’s different. And that can really work to your advantage.
You also have an upcoming return to The Fest, which you played multiple times early on but not since the year that you received the phone call about your mother. What sparked the decision to return?
Well, I’m a glutton for punishment, where obviously yes it has been ten years since we played. The last time played was when my mother had passed away when we were on stage. And I think because of it being a significant milestone for that, this is my way of trying to sort of own it, and sort of reframe Gainesville, and try to make a new memory of it. I told Pierce from Soul Glo from about it, and he’s like, “What’s up with the Fest? Like why is this on the tour?” And I told him the situation, and he just looked at me and he’s like, “You just trying to hurt yourself?” Which I was like, “That is a very valid point” [laughs]. I like to think of it in the way that I framed it but I 1000% understand why others would say that to me. And then on the other side of that coin is we always enjoyed playing that festival, and there had been times where it got brought up to play it in these last ten years but we just couldn’t make it work financially or whatever it was. So I’m excited to play it again. We had some of our most impactful sets in Florida there, so I’m excited to go back.
Speaking of Soul Glo, they used to be signed to your label Secret Voice, and it seems to be like you’ve really been ramping up the label recently. What’s made you put more focus on the label?
It’s been more busy than it’s ever been. I went from being a label that put out maybe one record every two years to all of a sudden four in a year, which is crazy. I blame Deathwish. They are the label that makes my label possible, but Rich Rossi–who is one of the heads at Deathwish, who is one of my favorite people who’s ever walked the earth–he one day was like, “If you want to do more, you have our blessing. Like, we will make sure that it gets done and that we work hard on it.” They were very much like, “We want to be able to take a lot of the stress off of you in that regard.” And to be completely candid, my relationship with working that label is I get to do the fun part, you know? I serve it more as like the A&R relationship; I enjoy finding bands, working with them, getting to know them, that whole process. But Deathwish really does take up the rest of the work. They handle the manufacturing, the distribution, the social art, like all of that. Like they are so in-house and so good at that, and the fact that they’re able to take that off of my plate makes doing the label much easier, ’cause my plate is extremely full. So that was also a big reason why I didn’t do it as much. I was always very allergic to doing a band’s LP, because I know how important that is for bands, and I never felt like I had the space in my brain to take on that responsibility, so that’s why I was doing EPs. Some labels feel a way about being sort of a stepping stone for bands, where they get salty if they put out a record for someone and then they go on to a bigger label. I am the opposite; I want to facilitate that. I love that aspect. Gouge Away went to Deathwish, Soul Glo went to Epitaph, all of these things I was also a part of. Like I want to be in that conversation, I want to help the bands grow, I think that’s fucking exciting.
But this time around it’s like, yeah I did an LP for Infant Island, I did an LP for Heavenly Blue. It was exciting but I still have nerves about it. And Blind Girls as well, even though that’s just a vinyl variant of that record. When I first talked to Blind Girls, I was like, “Let me do an EP, let me do a 7″ or something like that,” and then this conversation started of, “Why don’t you help be a part of the LP release process?” It still makes me anxious because I want to do as much as I possibly can for these bands, but it’s sometimes hard because I only have so much time in a day and I’m realizing as I’m getting older that that time is even less than I realize. Anyway, I love doing the label, I look forward to taking a bit of a break on it for probably the next year. I have one more release that I’m working on right now; it’s a brand new band but it’s a “members of” band. I didn’t wanna do one more, but when I heard the music I was like, “Jesus Christ, this is so good!” So that’s gonna be one more that’ll happen within the next year. It’s not a screamo band. I’ll say that. Band sounds like Nirvana.
As you said, your plate is extremely full, and another thing you’re always busy with is your podcast. Talking to all these musicians all the time and really digging into what they do, how would you say doing the podcast impacts or relates to what you do with Touché?
Whether I’m fully digesting it or not–I think I am–it’s a really nice motivation. The last question I ask every guest on the show is, “When was the first time you felt like you were doing the thing you had been working so hard towards?” And always, no matter who I’m talking to, I am so excited to finally get to that question because it’s always motivational. And it always is a nice reminder of how hard work can pay off. And sometimes those answers are very modest and very humble, and then sometimes it’s like, “Holy shit, yeah. Like that is really, really fucking cool.” Sometimes it could be like the first time we played out of our state and people sang along to our songs, or it could be when we got to fuckin’ open for the Foo Fighters, you know, whatever it is. But it’s always exciting to see someone light up about that, and it does drive me to take a look at my life and try to remember to appreciate all the small things, and not get too numb to great things happening. So for me, speaking of mental health, especially with the new record, it’s been a really driving force for keeping me insane at least one day a week, to have those conversations.
Touché Amoré — 2024 Tour Dates
10/9 – Los Angeles, CA @ Regent
10/11 – San Diego, CA @ The Cashbah
10/12 – Fresno, CA @ Strummers
10/13 – Sacramento, CA @ Aftershock
10/15 – Portland, OR @ Hawthorne Theater
10/16 – Seattle, WA @ Crocodile
10/17 – Boise, ID @ Treefort Music Hall
10/18 – Salt Lake City, UT @ The Complex
10/19 – Englewood, CO @ The Gothic Theatre
10/21 – Minneapolis, MN @ Fine Line
10/22 – Chicago, IL @ Bottom Lounge
10/23 – Detroit, MI @ Tangent
10/25 – Columbia, SC @ New Brookland Tavern
10/26 – Gainesville, FL @ Vivid (The Fest)
10/27 – Gainesville, FL @ Bo Diddley Plaza (The Fest)
10/28 – Atlanta, GA @ Masquerade (Hell)
10/29 – Durham, NC @ The Fruit
10/31 – Brooklyn, NY @ Warsaw
11/1 – Washington, DC @ Black Cat
11/2 – Philadelphia, PA @ Union Transfer
11/3 – Boston, MA @ Paradise
all non-festival dates with Soul Glo, Portrayal of Guilt, and Soft Blue Shimmer