Knumears "Directions" [First Run Club - Orange & Black Marble Vinyl]

Knumears understand that no band exists in a vacuum. They are an embodiment of a sonic tradition, one that’s been molded and shaped for decades and can only be carried by those who truly love it. Call it screamo, skramz, post-hardcore or whatever else–it’s a sound that’s somehow endured through years of changing musical tides and is now impacting a whole new generation of underground musicians. Now Knumears’ debut album, Directions, is equal parts love letter and cartography project, one that explores the deep history of a convoluted scene while creating an exciting blueprint for a new one.

Knumears are a group of not just passionate musicians, but friends whose bonds are as important as the music they make together. Since 2021, the Knumears (bassist Dante Garcia II, drummer Frankie Lopez, and vocalist/guitarist Matthew Cole) have been writing, touring and playing nonstop, moving from playing packed local shows with kids screaming, climbing, shouting and dancing to touring nationally and finding the same fervent reactions all across the country. But outside of the chaos of touring, the group found equal growth in their personal lives, strengthening old bonds with those back home, discovering new connections, and cultivating their own worlds. “All of us were kind of finding ourselves on our own and finding new relationships of all kinds,” Cole says, reflecting on the record’s development. “A lot of change was happening for each of us.” At first all of this personal upheaval was not completely conducive to writing a new album.

The band was scheduled to record with legendary producer/engineer Jack Shirley (Deafheaven, Loma Prieta, Touche Amore) but the band’s process felt somewhat stagnant until suddenly it wasn’t: “We were all struggling very much creativity wise,” explains Cole “We’d all found outlets in other projects while trying to write this record. But a few weeks before our time with Jack, we sat down and basically wrote the whole record. We practiced three times a week for probably a month and a half, it was practically flowing out of us.“

The result is an exceptionally urgent sounding album– even for a visceral genre like screamo. Knumears’ traffic in a sound that’s hyper-immediate yet notoriously difficult to define: it evolved from the primordial ooze of late ‘80s hardcore, earning the “post” signifier in the most literal way, then shifted in the ‘90s into something even more emotionally wrought and musically chaotic with bands like Heroin, Pg. 99, and Orchid. The sound evolved further with another boom in the late 2000s/early 2010s as Loma Prieta, Touche Amore, and more boiled the music into something more direct and even at times catchy in its own caustic way. Now Knumears and their contemporaries find themselves at the forefront of a modern screamo landscape.