“Music can save you for a day”: Touché Amoré on social media and subcultures

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In 2009, when Touché Amoré frontman Jeremy Bolm was set to jump into the studio with legendary Thursday lead singer Geoff Rickly, he was excited. Thursday were recording music for their 2011 album No Devolución, and Jeremy was about to collaborate with an artist that he had always looked up to. ​“As is very much my style, I had to prepare and prepare to impress Geoff,” he recalls. ​“So I wrote this song for him and showed it to him. It never went anywhere and they didn’t use it, so [a couple of years ago] I brought it to Touché and everyone in the band thought it was really cool.”

That song has now become ​‘Nobody’s’, the opening track and lead single from their sixth studio album, Spiral In A Straight Line. Lamenting the rapidity we jump to spill our feelings on social media, it’s vintage Touché – yearning, melodic, yet full of throwdown potential. 15 years since the release of their debut album …To the Beat of a Dead Horse, the band have become perhaps punk and hardcore’s most consistent pillar, holding steadfastly onto their emotionally intelligent, face-scrunching, short-yet-very-sweet brand of music. So much so that a track from 2009 is as effective – and as Touché – as a track from a time when Barack Obama had just been elected President and Myspace was the world’s largest social networking website.

Their longevity and consistency is remarkably difficult in music, as genres and scenes come into and fall out of fashion. Since 2009, when emo and hardcore was in the midst of a comeback, enough time has passed for people to label the music as having another ​“renaissance”. Touché though, have just continued doing what they do at an incredible clip, from exploring Jeremy’s mother’s cancer and his grief in Stage Four to opening up about disappointing family and friends in Parting the Sea Between Brightness and Me. Like Geoff, Bolm and company are now legends of the post-hardcore scene themselves now, known for their incisive storytelling and visceral live shows.

To celebrate the new album and reflect on a decade and a half of being themselves, we sat down with Jeremy to chat about opening up via lyrics, subcultures in the internet age and the hardcore re-revival.

Congratulations on your new album. Six is your favourite number right? What should listeners expect?

It is my favourite number, yes. Spiral In A Straight Line is not necessarily a concept record, but it has a universal theme of the stresses and anxieties that a lot of us feel – the overwhelming dread that can come with whatever’s going on in your life, that gets amplified by maybe a daily interaction that sets your day in a bad motion. Once I started writing, I saw this continuous thread of ​“wow, something’s not right”, and as usual I used writing to figure that stuff out for myself. And then while you have all that going on, trying to maintain appearances and get through the day because you have a job to do, or show up for other people, so you put on a strong face and make it through the day without helping yourself first.

I feel like people connect with your music because it’s personal, vulnerable even – why is that an important part of what you do? And why is music an important vehicle for exploring those things?

I think about songs from a completely different time. If you listen to soul or blues songs from the 50s and 60s, you’ll have these songs that are really hook‑y and have these beautiful choruses or incredible musical accompaniments. You can dance to it and people love these songs, but when you pay attention to the lyrics, a lot of them are really heartbreaking. I love that dichotomy of something you can tap your foot to and something you can have fun with, but at the core of it is something really sad. That’s always been a motivator – if someone can listen to a song and enjoy it just for the sonic sound, that’s amazing. For people to pull back that layer and unveil this other side to it, then it can become a tool to help heal. Or even at the most common baseline, have something to not feel so alone with. That’s the magic of music, you can tap your foot to it, or it can save you that day.

Are you normally quite open with personal topics in day-to-day life? Or is music a vehicle for expression?

It depends on the person [I’m talking to] and the kind of relationship I might have with them. Music has always been the easier place for me to say what I am truly going through. When it comes to music, it’s hard to dance around what you are really thinking, because you’re trying to get to the point of something. I’ve also found the more hyper-specific you are about what you are going through, those things are more universal.

What do you think hardcore, and generally a punk spirit means in a day and age when so much of our lives seem to be spent online and curated by social media?

I think it’s great for punk and hardcore because it makes it so much easier for bands to be discovered. There’s never been a drought of bands – there’s a million that come out every day – but I think it’s cool to see how many bands do get exposure a lot quicker. It could be a clip from one of their live shows and then all of a sudden people are reposting it and thinking that this band’s sick.

Why do you think it’s having a bit of a moment, bands like Speed and Scowl are getting a lot of attention. And are there any similarities compared to when you were coming out?

Now feels completely new. I think hardcore is just part of youth culture now. I go to shows and I’ll see kids that I’m like: ​“Oh, you just like this band but you’re not identifying as a hardcore kid.” That same kid who’s throwing it hard at the Speed show also almost exclusively listens to Chappell Roan, and that’s fucking awesome. It’s cool that this music that is hyper-aggressive and expressive can appeal to someone who likes Charli xcx. Pop, hardcore, rap and whatever else is just something that people happen to love and accept – it’s probably a symptom of TikTok, but I think it’s great. You just hope people who find this music don’t treat it like tourism, where they come to the show and then move onto the next thing that is popular or cool, and give it the respect it deserves.

Do you think young people are yearning to be part of underground scenes and communities, as platforms and algorithms make everything feel the same?

As someone who’s much older I can’t speak precisely to younger kids’ involvement, but with punk and hardcore, at the essence of it is the idea of giving back. It’s very welcoming, you don’t have to play in a band, you can pick up a camera and all of a sudden become a photographer, you can find a cool space in your community and you can start booking shows there – there’s always ways to participate. So you’d hope that people finding it for the first time see the positives in it and it becomes a part of their life.

How do you think your approaches to music and influences have changed since the late 2000s?

Yeah, it’s funny, we posted the stuff that we’ve been listening to that influences this record on Spotify, and I think there might be just one aggressive song on it. Not all of us are into aggressive music and only two of us keep up with current bands. Our guitar player Nick would never have identified as a hardcore kid – his entryway into this music was he loved AFI, but he’s always been into pop. A lot of us are into country, and I think there’s something really cool about five people who have different music tastes but know how to come together and collaborate to make this kind of music. There’s all these bands that as they continue their trajectory will try to implement different styles or go in new directions, but I feel like even if we tried to do something like that, once we all get in a room together and start making noise, it’s going to just sound like Touché no matter what. It will always have jangly guitars, heavy distorted bass and my yelping on top.

What do you make of it when people say that subcultures don’t exist anymore?

I understand it, it goes back to what I was saying about youth culture. But there’s always going to be hardcore kids, there’s always going to be exclusively rap communities and hip hop kids, and kids that are into electronic dance music. But there’s something pretty cool about people who just see the good in all these different things and want to participate.

How does it feel when people describe you as ​‘iconic’ or ​‘legendary’?

I can’t put much stock into that – that wouldn’t be good for my brain. I’ll just say ​“thank you”, but I can’t focus on it too much.

Spiral In A Straight Line will be released on October 11 via Rise.

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