ALBUM REVIEW: Til Your Lungs Fall Out – Grave Secrets

Somewhere in Los Angeles, maybe a few years ago, four friends came together, could’ve been at a show where the people on stage are now veterans of a scene. Maybe the friends shared a love for music, hardcore, for an overly intense catharsis that flows through it. This might not be how GRAVE SECRETS formed but by the sound of their debut full-length Til Your Lungs Fall Out nostalgia is something at the forefront of the young band’s mind. 

Nostalgia is easily fallen into during your twenties; you romanticise and mull over the past trying to remember moments differently from how they actually happened to try to escape the seeming dullness of the present. Tracks like Drugs latch on to the idealistic feeling of the summer, the idea of the best time of the year never ending and being invincible to an ongoing consumption of, you guessed it, drugs.

Preachers Nightmare and Fuck Shit Up follow up with hammering attacks with few chances to breathe but the liberation found in the lyrics sustains you in place of oxygen. The latter is particularly freeing and flies the flag for GRAVE SECRETS’ real attitude as vocalist Vinny Morales compulsively yells “I wanna fuck shit up / I just don’t give a fuck” in reaction to the decay he has seen amongst people ever since his childhood. 

The quartet seem to have two moods or default settings: attack ferociously with no regard for anything else, having any sonics from screeching guitars and drum skins clashing with sticks devastate what stands in their path; or embrace a wailing melancholy that Morales’ voice bleeds upon to. Abyss sees Morales falling into darker settings and is where the emo leanings of the quartet begin to prevalently shine through the fierceness of their attack. As the name suggests, it’s like slowly being enveloped in a gloomy shroud. Energy musters a moment of reflection in the present rather than being stuck in the past, becoming a late turning point in the narrative that GRAVE SECRETS spell out on the record. 

Closing on the longest track Son Of Me and beginning with a slow trudge with the finish line in sight, the scratch of strings bleeds outward like grey watercolour hitting paper, before breaking into the anthemic chorus which begs to be screamed back at the band in a live setting, oozing an inevitability that can’t be shaken. It references what tools that you use to get through the present, where that will lead to and past heartbreak where the disregard from someone else hurts the most.

GRAVE SECRETS have put together a debut record that is beautifully produced, its pain and all, with a narrative that traces over the past, present and the coming tinted by dreadfulness, not to mention laden down with the most singable hooks. It’s a good foundation but could be the very thing that holds them back from topping it early on in the near future. 

Rating: 9/10

Til Your Lungs Fall Out is out now via Wiretap Records.

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