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Solitude A Sleepless Nights' "Beyond Casualty" is Mesmerizing Japanese Post-Hardcore

While hardcore has been a movement with a distinctly American mark, the global market for expelling passion and pride should not be overlooked. With the whirling crispness of an impending thunderstorm, Chiba, Japan’s Solitude A Sleepless Nights is post-hardcore without precedent. Incorporating progressive and melodic elements, the stylish five-piece showcases what is on the horizon for rock. In this year’s release Beyond Casualty, their potential to bubble up from the underground is realized. Achieving the complete package of musical and visual aesthetic, Solitude A Sleepless Nights is here to mesmerize audiences through futuristic wonder.

The quintet’s early single “Meteorlights” quickly set the tone, providing pummelling percussion with the clean lines of clutch riffs and youthful vocals. The five-minute motherfucker has about everything one could possibly expect of a -core unit operating in 2019, including, but not limited too: floaty breaks, breakdowns, and full-fledged existential battle. This point of view continues to be developed on their first comprehensive release, 2016’s AGAIN&ALIVE. Solitude A Sleepless Nights’ courage to enter from the gate with ethereal piano spirals demonstrates a willingness to experiment, but they still provide enough of what the people came here for via mile-a-minute guitar work and old school vocal flows. In five well-developed tracks, AGAIN&ALIVE encompasses the past two decades’ interpretations of hardcore while also pushing the boundaries into the next era.

Living up to the bright sparks of its cover art, 2017 Our Ends EP is another unrelenting installment in Solitude A Sleepless Nights’ story. Soaring over slick city lights and snow-covered mountains alike, the project offers scene grit through its visceral vocals while maintaining a sense of underlying majesty. Final track “Ephemeral” provides a peak of what would become the outfit’s next chapter through its accessible, almost danceable melodies that take a turn for a steel toe to the jaw in the very next breath. Combining progressive writing with confrontational emotions, matters truly pop off with Beyond Casualty.

Bleeding the raw emotion of turn of the century alt-rock, opener “Aldebaran Eyes” quickly showcases the vocal feats that help define this record. A sense of modernity is kept up through dabblings in djent, yet, unlike other practitioners of this style, the troupe prevents themselves from staying too tightly inside of the box. While Beyond Casualty colors outside the lines, Solitude A Sleepless Nights remain confident in their identity of muted tones. Visuals for finale track “The Rectitude Pulsation” present team spirit with a touch of mystery as trench-coats grace the shores of billowing beaches. Bridging the gaps between traditional hardcore, its emo-fused post-movement, and the experimental pushes of the 2010s, Solitude A Sleepless Nights is a package worth keeping in your back pocket.

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