What’s even harder on the heart than all of the actual relational fuck ups, personal anxieties, confusion, and existential worry of your youth? Try all of that, now calcified around it alongside the weight of death, personal grief, capitalism, and political doom resting firmly over your shoulders on your fully adulted self, back pains and all. You don’t really ever get to grow out of being emo, and Algernon Cadawallader are living proof of that.

Thankfully, it’s also a tale of learning to live with it all, as the fourth-wave scene pioneers’ — once just a fable of the late 2000 scene’s house show circuit before some big publications called for a revival on it and hailed them in post-mortem form as one of its post-mainstream-and-back-to-its-underground-roots era’s most seminal bands — are now well and thriving, selling out clubs properly, and even got Saddle Creek by their side to release their your new music (those internal Hop Along connections come in handy, I’m sure of it…)

The woes sound effortlessly nimble within the four-piece’s worn hands, nonetheless, on their first post-reunion effort, Trying Not to Have a Thought. Though vocalist and bassist Peter Helmis, guitarists Joe Reinhart and Colin Mahony, and drummer Nick Tazza acknowledge the frays that come from gaining a deprecating, hyper self-aware life wisdom (“noitanitsarcorP”, “Trying Not To Have a Thought”), a painfully wistful peer into the rear view (“Hawk”, “Koyaanisqatsi”), and a bleaker historical perspective on a world view to bat (“Shameless Faces (even the guy who made the thing was a piece of shit)”, “ATTN Move”), they’re enjoying it through a nerdist hobby of emotive math rock problem solving that equates to an elder emo looking forward to their escape through a daily crossword or Sudoku.

While the long division to navigate big questions and the occasional exponential value thrown in for life tax purposes added complexity, the band’s collective finesse in puzzling together finger-tapping arpeggios, crooked time signatures, and when it all seems a little too heavy on the head — a blown out post-hardcore-addled anthem screamed from a megaphone pointed at the sky — sounds like just another easy day of devastation that shouldn’t surprise you at this point. “o we need permission to exist or do we just need to afford it?”, Helmis wonders on “World of Difference”. Go to sleep. Wake up. Do it all over again with a new problem to look forward to. Algernon Cadwallader have working through this daily dread of being alive thing figured out.

Highlights: “Shameless Faces (even the guy who made the thing was a piece of shit)”, “noitanitsarcorP”, “Trying Not to Have a Thought”

Algernon Cadwallader’s Trying Not to Have a Thought is available now on Saddle Creek.

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