Premiere: The Fourth Wall Share New Single 'Darkness of Heart'
New album Back forever Out this year
01 February 2024
Photo: Lisa Haagen
Fans last heard from melodic noise rock outfit The Fourth Wall with their 2018 album, Infinite Other. Late last year, the band returned with a new single, “Never A Part,” the first release from their upcoming fourth full-length album, Back forever.
Back forever has its roots in a series of home recordings made by band leader Stephen Agustin during the lockdown. As he describes, during this period he was collecting and editing stories from his family's history. He learned that a close relative had left a daughter behind when he moved to the United States. He was interested in what he calls “the poetry of oblivion”. “There was almost a way in which the impulse to revise or destroy history became a condition for achieving this happy state,” he explains. Lyrically, the record represents an attempt to sort through the complexities and contradictions of these experiences.
The full album will be released later this year, but today the band returns with another new single, “Darkness of Heart,” premiering on Under the Radar.
“Darkness of Heart” begins as a mellow acoustic effort, laced with brooding strums, subtle vocals and atmospheric synth touches. This calm tone is then broken halfway through with searing guitar licks, followed by the full band joining in, transforming the song into a raucous and sprawling mass of swelling synths, jagged melodies and triumphant harmonies. The initial simmering undercurrents of longing and catharsis come to the fore, leaving the track with a sense of cinematic drama and a wounded ache. Meanwhile, the lyrics examine the great hold the past can have on people trying to leave an old life behind: “You'd think it's all history/It's not even the past/You don't have to love me/For the ghost to last/I can never say/If I repeat what I repulse/I become the heart of darkness to suffocate/The darkness just to start it all over again”.
Agustin explains about the track, “While writing this record, I was processing all these pieces of my immigrant family history. Hearing many personal stories about the conditions and driving factors that led to their move to the states, I began to investigate some of the stories of war and colonialism (in Korea and the Philippines) that had always been lurking in the background, if hardly ever. discussed among family members from generation to generation.
The original idea for the song, “Darkness of Heart” was to reverse the roles and settings of Joseph Conrad. Heart of Darkness so that the “other” person infiltrates the “civilized” world instead (hence the reversal in the song's title). Instead of Kurtz's “go-wild” inside Heart of Darkness, a new kind of becoming plagues the song's protagonist. At its core, it's a story about a person who flees his home country in search of the American dream in hopes of forgetting all the past traumas that caused him to flee. However, through the process of assimilation, tensions from the past re-emerge in the new world, despite efforts to erase them from memory. The narrator attempts to make the most of his self-inflicted loss of identity while trapped in a loveless relationship that echoes past dead ends. The song wonders if the haunting pleasure of a new world being created and the willful suppression of the past is what sets the repetition compulsion in motion.”
Check out the song and video below. Back forever released everywhere later this year. You can also find the band's upcoming tour dates below.
3/15 – San Francisco / Great American Music Hall
3/16 – LA / The Echoplex
3/22 – Portland / Hall of Revolution
23/3 – Seattle / The Crocodile
from our partners at http://www.undertheradarmag.com/news/premiere_the_fourth_wall_shares_new_single_darkness_of_heart
