deathcrash swore off slowcore. Somersaults is what they became instead

For two albums, deathcrash barely spoke above a whisper. You leaned in to catch them, and that was the point — the London four-piece made music you had to meet halfway, guitars that took two minutes to decide whether to arrive at all. They belonged to the same South London churn as Black Country, New Road and caroline, all of them cutting their teeth at the Windmill in Brixton, but where those bands went maximal, deathcrash went quiet. Codeine quiet. Low quiet.

Then, before their third record even came out, the band gave an interview under the headline "no more slowcore." Which is either brave or reckless, depending on how much you loved the first two.

Where they started

The debut set the terms.

Return (2022) was patient to the point of provocation — long builds, drums that landed like distant events, a band clearly in love with the space between notes. It got them written up on both sides of the Atlantic, and it earned every comparison to the slowcore holy trinity. If you want the map of where that sound comes from, our guide to the slowcore holy trinity, and where to go after is the place to start.

The lineage matters here, because deathcrash weren't hiding it. Codeine's Frigid Stars (1990) is the founding document of this whole approach: dial the tempo down until every chord has weight, let silence do half the work. deathcrash grew up on it. Return and its follow-up Less — recorded over two weeks in a renovated crab factory in the Outer Hebrides, about as remote as a UK studio gets — were the sound of a young band paying that debt back with interest.

The turn

Somersaults is the first deathcrash album where you don't have to lean in. Tiernan Banks pushes his voice to the very front of the mix, and lets it set the mood instead of hiding underneath the guitars. The writing follows it there.

The lyrics have got specific in a way the old records never risked. Banks sings about codependency, a love triangle, phoning it in during sex — the small humiliations of your late twenties — and then, without much ceremony, arrives at something like acceptance. On "CMC" he lands on the line the whole album turns around: "This life is the best life / Oh god, it's the only one." It's the sound of a band that used to specialise in dread deciding, cautiously, to stop bracing for the worst.

That doesn't mean they've forgotten how to do the slow thing. "The Thing You Did" is the album's one long piece, and it's the best argument that leaving slowcore behind was always a bit of a marketing line. The patience is still in the bones. What's changed is the temperature — the warmth that used to be buried three layers down in the mix now sits right on the surface.

Does it work?

Mostly. Not everyone's convinced, and the skeptics have a real point: put a voice this far forward and you're asking it to carry weight the reverb used to carry for you. There are moments where Banks sounds slightly stranded, the arrangement thinning out around a melody that would rather have stayed a texture. When you build your whole identity on suggestion, saying things plainly is genuinely dangerous.

But the risk is the reason it matters. Plenty of bands from this scene have flamed out or gone in circles.

Black Country, New Road turned their own reinvention — losing a frontman, rebuilding around softer folk-pop — into some of the most loved British guitar music of the decade. Ants From Up There (2022) is the high bar for a band changing shape mid-flight and getting away with it. Somersaults is a smaller, more inward version of the same move, and it clears the bar it set itself.

Here's the thing about growing out of slowcore: the genre was never really about tempo. Low proved that across two decades — Things We Lost in the Fire (2001) is as devastating at a murmur as anything louder — and deathcrash have quietly figured out the same thing. You can bring the voice up, name the shame, let a little light in, and still be making music about how heavy it is to be alive. The whisper was a method, not the meaning.

Growing up, on the evidence of Somersaults, sounds less like giving up than they feared. Play it loud, then argue with me below — is this the record where deathcrash got better, or the one where they lost the plot? The comments are the whole point.