At a certain age, you start to wonder if the music of your youth will still hit the same way it once did. There’s definitely a fear of aging out of the hardcore scene on this end. Like, should I just save myself the embarrassment and get pretentiously academic in a performative way by getting really into mid-century jazz, or perhaps lean into a lifestyle more Patagonia and folky that pairs well with an episode of CBS Sunday Morning over brunch? I think I’d rather die right here and now, to be quite honest, especially in the case of the latter. It’s interesting that One Step Closer — a fast rising tour de force in the next-gen of melodic hardcore — are fending with that thought themselves on their sophomore effort, All You Embrace, but from the opposite end of the timeline. Akin to their peers in the scene in current tourmates Anxious and Koyo, the Wilkes-Barre crew on this go round have figured out a very, very sweet, hard to crack spot in their sonic formula that heavily figures in punk-pop and emo anthemry of a very early 2000s scene scale kind of way without sounding like they’re clinging onto glory years. Perhaps this is because they’ve still got their youth, but they’ve also got wisdom beyond them from all that time spent traveling the world over since releasing 2021’s breakthrough debut LP, This Place You Know. Where they were once were at war with the smallness of their worn out hometown surroundings, vocalist Ryan Savitski, guitarist Ross Thompson, and drummer Colman O’Brien are already looking for a way to find their way back to simplicity in rallying missives on loss of both the romantic and platonic form, all from thousands of miles away. If This Place You Know accomplished an escape through sheer melodic grit and shoving boulders out of their path with determination, All You Embrace‘s energy is as limitless as the world that has opened before their eyes, even in its big scary thoughts and realizations. The spurts here are measured by leap years and far off geographies that punctuate their emotional intensity with a catchier polish to makes each of them feel windswept by time. With that being said, there’s no limit on who these kind of quarter-life crisis ‘core anthems speak to when they’re flourishing like this. The thing you realize as you get past those years is that the intrusive thoughts on what we once held in our youth and where we are going today don’t really go away the older that we get. We just learn to live with them. One Step Closer embraces them as the hereafter.

Highlights: “Leap Years”, “Topanga”, “Giant’s Despair”

One Step Closer’s All You Embrace is available now on Run for Cover Records.

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