Boston hardcore act Defeater will release their fourth studio album, Abandoned, on August 28 on Epitaph.
Unlike most bands—and especially most hardcore bands— Defeater don’t write songs so much as they write histories, and specifically the history of a never-named New Jersey family whose already troubled lives disintegrate into torment, rendered all the more tragic for the depth and detail of singer Derek Archambault’s lyrics. Abandoned—recorded earlier this year at guitarist Jay Maas’ studio, with drummer Joe Longobardi, bassist Mike Poulin and guitarist Jake Woodruff—is the most relentlessly raw and uncompromising chapter so far, powered by a renewed sense of artistic ambition and a plot twist no one could have expected.
Abandoned was written and recorded in a welcome period of relief in Archambault’s life, after he’d finally received a life-changing surgery that repaired severe hip damage he suffered in an injury. Archambault’s surgery, he says, allowed him to redouble his connection with his own writing, leaving him clear to truly inhabit what he calls his own Glass family—after the famous J.D. Salinger characters. The new album chronicles the story of a lapsed Catholic priest, whose battles in Europe during the war drag him first toward faith and then his own poisonous faithlessness.
Archambault states:
“One of the threads running through this record is how people sometimes look for the answers to their problems in the darkest places.”
For the newly introduced to the band, Defeater‘s debut Travels started the story with the younger brother, a lifelong misfit forced to kill his father in defense of his mother, and forced to live with the consequences no matter how far he runs. Sophomore album Empty Days followed the older brother, dazed from the death of his father and fighting as his life dissolves into drinking and debt. And most recent album Letters Home was a surprisingly compassionate look at the father and his experiences overseas in World War II, presented in a reverse-chronological order that transformed the monster from Travels back into the man he once was.
Pre-orders for Abandoned are available at Kings Road Merch – http://flyt.it/DefeaterAbandonedstore and iTunes – http://found.ee/DefeaterAbandoned .
Defeater is touring in the UK and mainland Europe at the moment and will return on the Impericon Never Say Die Tour! this fall in support of the new album.
ABANDONED TRACK LIST
1. Contrition
2. Unanswered
3. December 1943
4. Spared In Hell
5. Divination
6. Borrowed & Blue
7. Penance
8. Remorse
9. Pillar Of Salt
10. Atonement
11. Vice & Regret
DEFEATER EUROPEAN TOUR DATES
07 July – Bristol (UK) – Marble Factory
08 July – Birmingham (UK) – The Oobleck
09 July – Edinburgh (UK) – Studio 24
10 July – Cheltenham (UK) – 2000trees Festival
11 July – Paris (FR) – Espace B
12 July – Cologne (DE) – Underground
13 July – Muncih (DE) – Feierwerk
14 July – Vienna (AT) – Viper Room
15 July – Dunaújváros (HUN) – Rockmaraton Festival
16 July – Viveiro (ES) – Resurrection Festival
18 July – Dour (BE) – Dour Festival
