Photo by Christian Barker

Artist: Dream Fatigue, the four-piece of vocalist Jonali McFadden, guitarists Lee Williams and Nate Gariepy, bassist Paul Klein, and drummer Matt Wood

Location: Salem, MA

Buzz: Salem is not Boston, but way too many bands from the wickedest part of the Baystate tend to get lumped into the capital city that’s still an hours drive away. Take Converge, for example, who despite their origins beginning in Salem and basically recording every album of theirs in guitarist and producer Kurt Ballou’s God City Studio, have come to accept their place as a definitively Boston-based metalcore band. More recently, next-gen metalcore experimentalists Vein.fm and their grungy alternative counterparts, Fleshwater, are collectively from the North Shore’s surrounding parts, too, and they get dubbed Bostonians in press article you read about them.

Maybe that’s why the latter two’s former drummer, Matt Wood, has made it an explicit point to put Salem on the map with his new band Dream Fatigue. It’s not just about a locational acknowledgement, however. Initially conceived through a creative partnership with vocalist Jonali McFadden, the band’s frontwoman lives by the supernatural way and even practices cartomancy when not pursuing her own creative magic in poetry and music.

That fact alone informs the dreamcast spells you hear behind the band’s newly released extended play, No Requiem, as unlike the surrounding alternative post-hardcore scene, this is music made with a desire to transcend something beyond what’s seen on the surface of this human experience. Whereas others might simply call that being emo, McFadden and Wood alongside Lee Williams, Nate Gariepy, and Paul Klein have leveled up beyond the devotional ‘gaze of their promising 2024 debut album, the lady in the sky, with an ability to spark big feeling magic in a mix of billowing grunge, heavily-dazed dream-pop, and theatrical emo rock. Bound together by McFadden’s lyrics soaring skyward into chorus and Wood’s explosive kitwork further their ascent, this seven-song wonder unlocks a power within that can reclaim the true self.

Sound: A supercharged astral projection of the soul through an incantation of heavy pop and hardcore-adjacent anthemry.

Recommended: “Be Your Anchor, “Astral Stomp”, and “Spun” from their newly-released EP, No Requiem

Dream Fatigue’s No Requiem will be released February 13th on DAZE.