For its third album, California hardcore band Dangers seems inclined to get a little weird. In many ways the band seems to be following Blacklisted’s lead, laying down a solid foundation of fast-yet-groovy hardcore then darting off on its own path for its third album. Topshelf Records will release The Bend In The Break on October 14 and The A.V. Club is streaming the album’s title track below. The song doesn’t see Dangers attempting to distance itself from its past, instead finding ways to tap into a dormant Refused influence. “The Bend In The Break” swings like a wrecking ball; slow and deliberate but still wildly destructive. It all serves as a platform for vocalist Alfred Brown IV to ruminate on aging, illness, and the inevitability of death. Brown had the following to say about the song’s inspiration, and how it plays into the record’s black humor:
Sometime during the middle of writing this record, my childhood best friend called me from New York to tell me that he’d been diagnosed with thyroid cancer. This was the person that I discovered music with, that I played in my first bands with, that actually recorded the drums last-minute on our demo tape. We met in summer school between 6th and 7th grade, during that awkward time when life at the edge of the western world means beach and booze and bourgeois. We opted for Black Flag and Descendents. When he told me, I was sitting at the barbershop, waiting to get my haircut, and we both erupted in laughter. Life had snuck up behind us when we weren’t looking and traded away our youth for a new phase of life whereby things like cancer and divorce—and even death—these weren’t the heavy things happening to the adults we knew and were raised by, these were the heavy things happening to us. “Where’s the line,” I wonder on the song, “between the young and whatever else that we become?” This song—this record— stands, for our band, as a testament to that line. That murky estuary where we’ve all been forced to revisit our priorities, or hopes, the dreams we’ve got to let go. For some, the bright lights still beckon. For others, the grit of life has got itself in the way. For the four of us—and for my best friend, now in full remission and engaged to be married—treading water is more than enough.
Pre-orders for The Bend In The Break are available now through Topshelf Records.