Refused are fucking done — or they’re about to be fucking done, anyway. The adventurous Swedish punk band famously broke up in the middle of a 1998 North American tour, just after the release of their opus The Shape Of Punk To Come, before reuniting in 2012 and making two more albums. Earlier this year, they were supposed to headline Stockholm’s Rosendal Garden Party in what was billed as “their last festival gig in Sweden. Ever.” They didn’t make it to that show, as frontman Dennis Lyxzén suffered a heart attack just before the show. Now, Lyxzén is on his way to a full recovery, and Refused have announced a second breakup. This one is a lot more planned-out than their first.

In July, Touché Amoré announced their new album Spiral In A Straight Line and released the awesome lead single “Nobody’s.” Today, the post-hardcore heroes are back with another banger, “Hal Ashby.”

Every week the Stereogum staff chooses the five best new songs of the week. The eligibility period begins and ends Thursdays right before midnight. You can hear this week’s picks below and on Stereogum’s Favorite New Music Spotify playlist, which is updated weekly. (An expanded playlist of our new music picks is available to members on Spotify and Apple Music, updated throughout the week.)

LA post-hardcore favorites Touché Amoré have announced their first new album in four years. Following 2020’s Lament, Spiral In A Straight Line is set for release in October and features guest spots from Lou Barlow (Dinosaur Jr., Sebadoh, the Folk Implosion) and Julien Baker, whom you might remember joined Touché onstage last December in Los Angeles for a performance of “Reminders” (on which she also sang-shouted backup).

This was a weekend full of violent spectacle, and by that of course I mean that Sound And Fury went down in Los Angeles. The Sound And Fury fest, North America’s biggest hardcore festival by far, moved to LA’s Exposition Park a couple of years ago, and it was probably the single most important annual event on the hardcore calendar even before it started drawing gigantic post-pandemic crowds. Once again, those of us who were not there can look upon this year’s footage and feel absolute despondence, which might be slightly lessened by the fact that we made it through the weekend without anyone kicking us in the jaw.

For years, Manchester’s Outbreak Fest has had a reputation as one of the world’s biggest, best hardcore festivals, and it’s gotten big enough that it’s basically become something other than a hardcore festival. Last year, the festival got a bit of blowback for billing Denzel Curry and Death Grips above all the hardcore bands on its lineup. This year, the festival is doing things a bit differently. It’s still something other than a hardcore fest, but it’s hard to picture anyone complaining too much about this one.

West Coast post-hardcore outfit Touché Amoré have been on the road opening for Deafheaven at their Sunbather 10th anniversary shows. On Friday night in Los Angeles at The Novo, Touché were joined by Julien Baker on stage for “Reminders” from their 2020 album Lament.

We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.

In a playlist era, it’s not easy for a compilation album to come out and cut through the noise, but we should all make an exception for Balladeers, Redefined. Touché Amoré leader Jeremy Bolm has spent years assembling a sprawling 31-song document of the thriving screamo underground, and it’ll finally be out later this week. Bolm has already shared a ton of compilation tracks, including selections from bands like Record Setter, Gillian Carter, and Infant Island. We still haven’t heard the new joints from the likes of Soul Glo, For Your Health, and Terminal Bliss. Today, though, we get three new songs from three new heavyweights.

Californian post-hardcore warriors Touché Amoré make bruising, emotional music. Last year, for example, they released Lament, one of the year’s best albums. More recently, Touché have been covering other people’s tracks, which seems like a pretty good way to unwind after scraping their own souls. In July, frontman Jeremy Bolm sang lead on the great Two Minutes To Late Night version of the Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind.” Last month, Touché dropped their take on the Strokes’ “Hard To Explain.” And now, Touché have enlisted a friend, Joyce Manor leader Barry Johnson, to help out on their remake of an indie rock classic.

The Strokes’ debut album Is This It reaches its 20th anniversary this year, and Touché Amoré are apparently among those celebrating. The Jeremy Bolm-led LA post-hardcore living legends have — quite unexpectedly — released a cover of Is This It‘s lead single “Hard To Explain.”

The AEW wrestler Orange Cassidy is an unlikely hero for our times. If you don’t watch wrestling, Cassidy’s whole gimmick is that he’s constantly bored by everything about him, and he can’t be bothered to actually do shit. He wrestles with his sunglasses on and his hands in his pockets, and whenever he does fire up and start beating someone’s ass, it’s overwhelmingly exciting. Cassidy has gone from cult-hero status to full-blown headliner, and now AEW has shelled out the money to start using the Pixies classic “Where Is My Mind” as his entrance music. Today, Cassidy has shown up on a hardcore version of “Where Is My Mind,” the latest video from the Two Minutes To Late Night series.

By 2011, post-hardcore had become a meaningless term. What had once denoted a style of music that pushed the boundaries of the genre it came from was now, in many ways, codified and commodified into something sleek and polished, the likes of which hardcore had initially willed itself into existence to spite.

Every December, after we publish our best albums list, the Stereogum staff puts a more personal spotlight on our favorite songs of the year. Rather than voting on a collective countdown, we each present a playlist of 10 tracks that meant the world to us. Today we’re ready to once again present our picks. The parameters: No song can appear on more than one person’s list, and all the songs had to be released in 2020 — or at least they had to loom large over this year after coming out in 2019. Enjoy!

If the musicians of the world had decided to take 2020 off — or if they all went out and found different jobs — everyone would’ve understood. Touring, the chief way most full-time musicians make their money, was simply not a possibility this year, and it’ll be a long time before we fully understand the effects of the entire live-music economy grinding to a sudden halt. But the music never stopped. It didn’t even slow down. The constant flood of new music remained as strong as ever. It’s enough to bring a tear to your eye.

“A Broadcast” begins with a rare moment of respite on a Touché Amoré album. Soft guitar chords ripple with tremolo then vanish. Weeping pedal steel wafts upward over distant acoustic strums. “It’s that special kind of quiet where one might be concerned,” sings Jeremy Bolm in a softened version of his blunt, frantic bark. “But even with this silence, my voice can be misheard.”

Touché Amoré, the great emotional post-hardcore bashers led by Jeremy Bolm, are coming back next week with their new album Lament. We've already heard early tracks "Deflector," "Limelight" with Manchester Orchestra's Andy Hull, and "I'll Be Your Host," and now they're getting one last track in under the wire, "Reminnders," which Bolm wrote in the midst of the anxiety following Trump's impeachment trial. “I think when we are all panicking, we need to have those reminders that there’s love out there for us whether we believe it or not and that’s all that we can really trust to save us,” he explains.

Next month, the great Los Angeles post-hardcore band Touché Amoré will return with their new album Lament. The new LP is the follow-up to 2016's Stage Four, the album where frontman Jeremy Bolm got deep and intense about watching his mother die of cancer. That album just crushes, and it's a hard act to follow. In making the new one, Touché found a surprising collaborator: All-star nü-metal producer Ross Robinson, who has some experience in Touché's world thanks to his work with bands like At The Drive-In and Blood Brothers.

Every week the Stereogum staff chooses the five best new songs of the week (the eligibility period begins and ends Thursdays right before midnight). This week's countdown is below, and you can listen to a playlist of all our 5 Best Songs on Spotify.

When the majestic, emotive Los Angeles post-hardcore band Touché Amoré doesn't have anything going on, the different members of Touché Amoré apparently like to scatter in different directions, and they all go make their own nasty-ass hardcore albums on their own. Frontman Jeremy Bolm has his Hesitation Wounds side project, and they released the severe, adrenaline-charged album Chicanery last year. And now guitarist Clayton Stevens has gone and formed his own band Entry, and they've just released an absolute monster of a debut album.

Three years ago, almost to the day, the great LA post-hardcore band Touché Amoré released Stage Four, an absolute gut-ripper of an album. On that LP, frontman Jeremy Bolm wrote about watching cancer kill his mother. It was heavy. After putting something like that out into the world, you can understand why a band might want to take a breath before going on. And Touché Amoré, for the most part, have been quiet lately. But now they're back.

There's a new Hesitation Wounds album coming out, and from what we've heard so far, it's going to be nasty. Hesitation Wounds is the straight-up hardcore side project led by Jeremy Bolm, frontman of Los Angeles post-hardcore giants Touché Amoré. In Hesitation Wounds, Bolm is joined by members of Gouge Away, Trap Them, and the Hope Conspiracy. Three years ago, they released the roiling, intense debut album Awake For Everything. And now they're getting ready to give us a follow-up that might be even heavier.

Three years ago, Jeremy Bolm, frontman of the great Los Angeles post-hardcore band Touché Amoré, put together a new band. Bolm also leads Hesitation Wounds, a band that makes straight-up throat-ripper hardcore. In 2016, Hesitation Wounds released their debut album Awake For Everything. It ruled. And now they've announced that a new album, entitled Chicanery, will come out later this summer. It might rule, too.

New York is a great place to see a rap show, partly because there's always a chance that a special guest or two will make a surprise appearance onstage. The same thing does not typically happen at post-hardcore shows, but it did last night. Los Angeles warriors Touché Amoré, currently touring behind their heart-ripping 2016 album Stage Four, played the Bowery Ballroom last night, and a couple of friends joined them onstage, as Brooklyn Vegan points out. First, the band welcomed Thursday frontman Geoff Rickly, who guested on Touché Amoré's debut album, to help them out on the Stage Four track "Flowers And You." And they also brought out Ned Russin, frontman of the Pennsylvania band Title Fight. Together, they performed "Crescent-Shaped Depression," a Title Fight song that Touché Amoré covered on a 2011 split EP. The band posted videos of both songs on their Instagram; watch them below.

This week's two best music-related videos both involved, in some capacity, rap music and children: Migos rapping Llama Llama Red Pajama and Anderson .Paak dancing with his son on Ellen. These are dire times, and videos like those are going to be necessary to keep our spirits up. Unfortunately, neither one is an actual video, so neither one is on this list. Instead, our picks are below.

One of my favorite albums of last year was Stage Four, the LP from the Los Angeles post-hardcore band Touché Amoré in which frontman Jeremy Bolm, in cathartic fashion, dealt with the death of his mother. It's a ridiculously powerful and bruising piece of work, and its videos have given that same feeling. In the clip for the Julien Baker collab "Skyscraper," Bolm pushed an empty wheelchair around New York City, evoking the trip he took with his mother there shortly before dying. On the album track "Benediction," Bolm remembers traveling to his mother's small Nebraska hometown, where he and his brother buried his mother's ashes. In the new video for the song, he returns to that town to lay flowers on her grave. "Skyscraper" director Chris Willmore again films Bolm. Watch it below, via NPR.

The great LA post-hardcore band Touché Amoré earned an Album Of The Week nod last month for their brutal new one Stage Four. And today, they stopped by the A.V. Club to take part in the long-running A.V. Undercover series by covering Pearl Jam's best song, aka "Corduroy." "Pearl Jam was like, the reason I wanted to be in a band," frontman Jeremy Bolm explains. "I remember the first time seeing the "Even Flow" video where Eddie Vedder climbs up on the rafters and stagedives and thinking, as like an eight year old kid, 'That's what I wanna do. I don't know what that is, but I wanna do that.' So I bought Ten immediately." Watch their performance below.

The 'gum squad is headed upstate to Basilica Soundscape this weekend to see Angel Olsen, Cobalt, Wolves In The Throne Room, Explosions In The Sky, and a bunch of other shit that will sound real good in a big, old, spooky factory. Perfect timing, too, because it's finally starting to feel like fall. It's been a great week for new music; check out the best of the best below.

As of this morning, our reigning Album Of The Week is Stage Four, the new one from the fearsome, hardcore-damaged Los Angeles band Touché Amoré. The album is a sort of concept-piece, frontman Jeremy Bolm's story about watching his mother die of cancer. It is intense. The album is out Friday, and we've posted three of its songs: "Palm Dreams," "Displacement," and "Skyscraper." Now the band have shared the titanic "Rapture," which might be the single most intense and shattering song on the album. Listen to it below.

"I haven't found the courage to listen to your last message to me." That's Touché Amoré frontman Jeremy Bolm, partway through his band's new album, Stage Four. He's singing to his mother, who died of cancer in 2014. She's the "you." The whole album is about her, and about Bolm's reactions to her death, and a pretty huge chunk of it is sung directly to her. The one line, about the message, is devastating in part because it's so simple and identifiable. It's not a huge leap to imagine yourself keeping that last message stored on your phone, unheard, constantly stressing that you're going to drop your phone in a puddle and that message is going to remain unheard forever. As "Skyscraper," the album's last song, fades out, we hear that message. Bolm included it on the album. It's not what we want to hear from a message that comes from beyond the grave. It's not some heartfelt burst of emotion, some piece of sage advice. It's just a simple mundane thing about picking up a prescription from CVS. And maybe that's why it resonates the way it does, why I have to take a few seconds to hear myself breathe after Stage Four ends.

I watched Frank Ocean's "Nikes" video for the first time on a borrowed phone, on a playground, on Saturday morning, keeping half an eye on my kids and waiting to be bowled over. It didn't happen. That can be the danger with a long-awaited new masterwork suddenly emerging: You expect it to move the earth, and nothing can live up to what you've been hoping to see. At first, I had the "Nikes" video left off of this list. Then I changed my mind. I struggled with where to put it. It's definitely the most significant video to come out in the past seven days, but I don't think it's the best. I think I put it in the right place. I hope I put it in the right place. This week's picks are below.

Next month, the great Los Angeles post-hardcore band Touché Amoré will release Stage Four, an album that frontman Jeremy Bolm wrote about watching his mother die of cancer. The album ends with the crushing "Skyscraper," a collaboration with the great singer-songwriter Julien Baker, and it's about the time Bolm took his mother to New York, a city she'd always wanted to see. A few months before she died, Bolm and his brother pushed her around Manhattan in a wheelchair. And in the new video for "Skyscraper," a stoic Bolm pushes an empty wheelchair through the streets of the city. The symbolism is just devastating. Most of the video is in stark black-and-white, but it switches to color for Times Square at night. And, given all that context, if you can make it through this video without shedding a tear, you are stronger than me. Watch it below, via Noisey.

Touché Amoré are revving up to release their latest full-length effort Stage Four in exactly one month. They've already shared excellent singles with "Palm Dreams" and "Displacement." Today, talking with SPIN about the album, they revealed a gem of a tune with the awesome folk darling Julien Baker called "Skyscraper." It's a rumbling, rising anthem that hits immense heights on its hook and crescendo with Baker's voice as the perfect gauzy accent to offset the density of the sustained guitars and grumbling drums. Listen.

Touché Amoré are gearing up to release their great new album, Stage Four, in a couple of months. We've heard two songs from it so far -- "Palm Dreams" and "Displacement" -- and today the band is sharing a video for the former track. It was directed by Tyler W. Davis and was directly inspired by the faded but alluring Hollywood glamor of David Lynch's Mullholland Drive. Watch via Pitchfork below.

New York City welcomes its first ever Panorama Music Festival this weekend and unfortunately, it's going to be hot. Really hot. Like, it's going to be so hot that some app Collin uses claimed that we will be living inside of a "heat cloud" for the next few days. What exactly is a "heat cloud," you might ask? We've been debating it all day. Whatever the hell it is, most of the city wants to avoid it by staying inside with the A/C cranked to its coolest setting or laying out at the beach pretending the RNC didn't happen. As Fiona Apple once pointed out: "This world is bullshit." And even though she made that declaration 20 years ago, it rings so, so true today. Sometimes all you have left is the music that makes you hopeful, or at least momentarily happy.

Losing a loved one to any drawn-out terminal disease results in a lot of mixed emotions: helplessness, anger, relief, fear, an unfathomable grief. Touché Amoré vocalist Jeremy Bolm lost his mother to cancer, and Stage Four -- the band's upcoming new album -- is a powerful document that attempts to navigate that loss and come to terms with a relationship and person that have now ceased to exist. In a lot of ways, the album reminds me of Japanese Breakfast's Psychopomp, another album from this year that dealt with a similar loss.

"Displacement" in particular has echoes of "In Heaven," as both songs explore what happens when the person you loved believed in a higher power, but you can't take the same leap of faith to believe in a god that would cause such pain. Michelle Zauner rendered that disconnect into gauzy indie-pop, while Bolm opts for tempered aggression. "You died at 69 with a body full of cancer," he starts off. "I asked your god, 'How could you?'/ But never heard an answer."

LA-based post-hardcore band Touché Amoré are back with their fourth album (and first for Epitaph), Stage Four, the follow-up to 2013's Is Survived By. "Palm Dreams," the record's lead single, is a sterling example of form -- vocalist Jeremy Bolm scorches through two-and-a-half minutes of tension-beating, packing in at least four or five lines that beg to be screamed along with.

"When you lose someone, you also lose their side of the story," Bolm told NPR of the track. "'Palm Dreams' was written around the realization that I never had a full understanding why my mother moved from Nebraska to California in the '70s. I assume that because she was from a small town, her eyes were wide with the concept of Hollywood. I'm sure someone else in my family could tell me, but it wouldn't be her answer. If this song inspires anyone to ask the questions they've never asked their loved ones, I'd call it a success."

Also of note: Julien Baker features on the album's closing track! Listen to the new one below.

Jeremy Bolm, frontman for post-hardcore insurgents Touché Amoré, has himself another band. It's called Hesitation Wounds, and it also features members of the Hope Conspiracy and Trap Them, as well as the former Against Me! member, current Slipknot drummer, and E Street Band scion Jay Weinberg. Hesitation Wounds play an intense, combustible form of hardcore. They sound like a more groove-oriented Converge, and from where I'm sitting, that's an awesome thing to be. We've posted their songs "Teeth," "New Abuse," "Guthrie," and "Operatic." And right now, you can stream the entire album below, via The Independent.