Downard - Downard(2) (2025)

Every once in a while, you hear a song that hammers you so hard that you can’t forget where you were and what you were doing when it first played. I remember listening to a Trauma Ray and Downward split from 2023 when Downward’s song “The Waltz” came up. I was transfixed and immediately began looking for more of the band’s music. Luckily, when I found the split, it was 2 years old and Downward had just released their second album. It quickly became one of my most played albums of the last year.
Over the last couple of years, a music style that is near and dear to the me who spent the early 90’s driving around in a battered old Saab with the radio turned up past its design capabilities, started going through a renaissance. Originally shoegaze was popularized by Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine and Kitchens of Distinction. On their first album, Downward’s melodically obscure lyrics and soaring guitar noise clearly pulled from shoegaze and its many permutations. Seven years later, for the second album, they began pushing the genre box that tried to contain them.
Downward(2) definitely trips my nostalgia for late 80’s and early 90’s music. The distorted wall of guitar noise soundscape and the slowed down drumming wander in an out of genres like grunge, goth and punk. Lead singer Drew Richardson’s almost mumbled vocals remind me of the first time I heard REM’s Murmur. My stepbrother had passed that gem onto me because his mother’s boyfriend had given it to him and he found it tedious and illogical. Another one of those transfixing music moments, I still remember looking at the underside of the upper bunk bed while Micheal Stipe and company blew my mind.

But nostalgia is just a key to unlock the door to this beautiful piece of art. This is more than zoomergrunge or zoomergaze as the critics deride it. The music accomplishes a unique trick of being both tight and leaving space, guitar noise surfaces and plunges, pulls together a tapestry and then blows it apart. And in the spaces opened up, Richardson swoops in with a joyful melancholy that pulls me into the speakers. Toward’s the end of the album they offer up a version of “The Waltz” that reminds me of that first brilliant moment and subtly improves on the original version. In today’s age of curated playlists, algorithmic suggestions from streaming services, it’s always amazing to stumble across an album that urges you to listen to it repeatedly in the order chosen by the band.