Touché Amoré: “Hardcore deserves respect for the way it has helped people, and for the way that it continues to do”

Part-timing at Amoeba comes with a few downsides – wallet-draining first pick on new arrivals, seeing wax he’s already paid for come through at a far lower price – but ultimately it dovetails conveniently into a life that’s never been more immersed in music. The tailspin fuelling Touché Amoré’s imminent sixth album Spiral In A Straight Line might be personal, but the art of cathartic sound remains the North Star guiding Jeremy’s journey.

A couple of days before our catch-up, Touché were headlining the 1,000-cap Nile Theatre in Mesa, Arizona. A couple after, they’ll be tearing it up at Kentucky mega-fest Louder Than Life. And last time we saw them they were back at Manchester’s Outbreak Fest, lighting it up under pale grey skies in front of close to 7,000 fans. Rather than just passing through – and aside from crashing good friends Thursday’s second-stage headline – Jeremy spent most of the weekend wandering site and chatting, as a fan.

“The best place to experience any band is always from the audience’s point of view,” he says. “There are obviously comforts to being backstage: a little space, a better view, but the sound tends to be pretty shit. You might feel cool, but if you actually like the music, it doesn’t translate!”

That feet-on-the-tarmac clear-sightedness has made Jeremy a de facto figurehead for hardcore.

“I don’t think I have any control over it,” he laughs as we bring up the ‘elder statesman’ label. “I’m 41 now. I’m not getting any younger! And I’ve always loved putting on for the bands I believe in. Why have I stuck around when so many peers have fallen away? I guess I just don’t know any better. This is the world I come from. It harbours all my friends. It generates the music that excites me.

"With the record label, there’s no higher privilege than finding an exciting band who’re willing to take a risk with me. My podcast gives me an opportunity to talk to interesting people with cool things to say. And I don’t believe that people who do ‘fall away’ do so because of hardcore. It’s about responsibilities. As someone without children, who’s never really had an ‘adult’ job, it’s easy for me to stick around. People are just wired differently. Some chase stability and comfort. I follow my enthusiastic instincts. I’ll never own a home, but I’ll have this. And I’m thankful for it!”

Protective, too. Having seen his community swollen and sunk by waves over the decades, the current influx of new fans is something he weighs up carefully. Between the influence of TikTok and the explosion of bands like Turnstile, Drain, Scowl and Speed, it’s clear that the broader hardcore community has been assimilated into “youth culture”. It’s the place of younger minds to determine its future – but some old truths need to be acknowledged for it to survive and thrive.

“It would be reductive to say, ‘Look at all these new kids coming in here. Do they know about the important history of punk and hardcore?!’ That’s not for us to worry about. I just hope that anyone excited by this genre treats it like a camp ground: leaving it better than it was when they arrived. Treat it with respect. If you do decide to move on from it, speak highly of your time here. Hardcore deserves real respect for how it has helped people, and for the way that it continues to do.”

Gatekeeper negativity isn’t what this world thrives on. Rather, it’s community, creativity and opportunity. Sometimes the more outlandish the better. And Jeremy’s cameo in oddball 2022 ‘biopic’ Weird: The Al Yankovic Story is a prime example of the importance of being willing to say, ‘Yes.’

“I’d interviewed director Eric Appel a couple of months earlier. When he hit me up [asking if I still had my head shaved] it was like, ‘This is the coolest thing in the entire world and a life experience I would otherwise never have.’

"It reminded me of the first time we toured arenas in Europe with Rise Against. At the time, some bands in our world would give us shit for playing in an arena, opening for this big rock band. Meanwhile, we were thinking, ‘When would a band like ours ever have the opportunity to play a fucking arena?’ You only live on this planet once. And you start a band to have new experiences. So we’ll take every cool experience that comes our way.”

Perhaps it’s unintentional that Spiral In A Straight Line’s title calls to mind the image of film unspooling from an old-school projector, but there is something undeniably cinematic in its vibrant cutting together of scenes from a life in motion. An admission that, “It was written at an extremely chaotic time in my life” calls to mind the explosive final scene from Fight Club, but Jeremy insists that the tension and melancholia of PT Anderson’s Magnolia is a more apt point of reference.

“There’s a lot going on, a lot of melancholy, but it’s not straightforward at all,” he says, unwilling to delve into specifics, allowing the sorrow and isolation of his lyrics, diction and delivery to speak for themselves. “And Magnolia gets so emotionally charged in that last hour. As I listen back to a song like Finalist (‘Please have mercy on me as nothing is what it used to be / Grant me strength, some dignity / Spare me all the sympathy / As I adjust to me and only me’) I can feel the levels of stress and chaos. I can hear that I am hanging on by a thread. I was going through a lot of change in my life: a lot of scary change. The whole band – even producer Ross Robinson – seemed to be experiencing a lot of big changes all at the same time.

"It’s very palpable. In that, the key theme is being destabilised but trying to maintain at least a semblance of control. There are a million different ways that our days can start off on the wrong foot, but we’ve still got to put on our shoes and get out there to do a job. You might be spiralling, but you still have to walk a straight line.”

Guesting on Megan Braun’s excellent Intermission podcast recently, Jeremy reluctantly likened his current day-to-day to 2001 record store comedy High Fidelity. Where his younger self envied main character Rob Gordon’s quick wit, ownership of his own business and encyclopaedic knowledge of music, “through 2024 eyes” Jeremy sees his callousness and condescension as “pretty uncool, not something anyone wants to be”. A songwriter who’s always been conscious of ageing – 2013’s Is Survived By was basically a treatise on turning 30 – he’s more aware than ever that with another decade passed, he’s grown reflective, more composed and less fixated on arbitrary milestones.

“It’s so stupid that I made such a big deal of turning 30.” A roll of the eyes. “Thirty is the easiest shit in the world. Being so worried about legacy at that point was a young man’s folly. It’s funny to reflect, ‘Man, you didn’t even know what was ahead.’

"I’m a lot more easy-going nowadays. I’ve learned how inconsequential things can be, not to take them personally, and to say, ‘I don’t give a fuck’. I’ve had dumb misunderstandings and drama with people, and I’m so happy to have had the [constructive] conversations so I don’t need to think about those things anymore. I’m just here to celebrate life and as supportive as possible to those around me. That’s really all that we can do.”

Misunderstanding – and the misunderstood – is a theme never more intriguingly explored than on keystone single Hal Ashby, named after the legendary countercultural ‘New Hollywood’ director whose characters were often defined by being misread. Waving to the poster for 1971 black comedy Harold & Maude hanging over his desk, Jeremy couldn’t resist the reference to one of his favourites.

Outwardly, that film looks like a bizarre age-gap romance, but it’s actually about the exchange of wisdom between a life-loving 79-year-old woman and a death-obsessed younger man. The Last Detail, from 1973, is the story of a Navy prisoner in transit who proves far more unworldly than he seems. Meanwhile, the 1979 satire Being There follows a simple-minded gardener whose race, gender and old-fashioned mannerisms see him mistaken for an educated businessman fallen on hard times.

Asked how much he relates to Ashby as an artist, and how exactly a singer famed for their energetic outlook and defiant positivity chimes with such dark humour and cynicism, Jeremy half-laughs that perhaps he’s the one who’s misunderstood.

“Oh, I come off that way? That’s great! I suppose that people have projected onto me the idea that I’m this positive person. I try to convey that in press, and I’m usually smiling onstage because I’m so thankful for all of this. But anyone who really knows me deep inside will tell you, ‘That is one pessimistic motherfucker!’”

“There are cycles in everything that we do,” Jeremy nods. “Constantly. When I realised the album was going to be called Spiral In A Straight Line, I started to implement repetition into my lyrics in a way that I never had before: ‘We’re spun around’ or ‘Around and around and around.’ I’ve never done that before, but that sense of being constantly wound up or spun completed the theme.”

There is often value in repetition. Expanding on the decision to work with Ross Robinson again, he explains it’s a continuation of Touché Amoré’s habit of “doing things in twos”. There were two records on Deathwish followed by two on Epitaph, then on to new label rise Rise; two albums with Brad Wood followed by two with Ross.

“There’s something about working with someone the first time, seeing what it’s like, gleaning experiences from it, then applying those to build upon it. Making Is Survived By in 2013, we were still wet behind the ears, just nervous and excited to work with Brad. But we took all we learned and made [definitive fourth album] Stage Four. Lament was a whirlwind of emotions, stress and Ross putting us through the wringer. But we talked about doing the next record with him as soon as we’d finished, knowing we’d have to be ready to change things up on the fly and how he’d push me to get those feelings of stress and chaos right at the brink.”

Musically, Spiral…’s collaborations balance freshness and familiarity, too. Penning deep-felt highlight Subversion, Jeremy felt the vinyl crackle of Brand New Love by Massachusetts indie icons Sebadoh creeping in. Needing to pay his dues to the 1990 classic, he decided to overlay its lyrics over the outro. Original frontman Lou Barlow’s agreement to lend his vocals a spine-tingling bonus.

“I just got really brazen and asked, ‘I wonder if the guy who wrote the song would do it.’ I wrote him an email, trying to be as thoughtful as possible. He wrote us back to say it sounded cool!”

Tennessee songstress Julien Baker, meanwhile, who previously appeared on 2016’s Skyscraper and 2020’s Reminders, takes pride of place with a gorgeous contribution to aching closer Goodbye For Now: her first in-studio work with the band.

“We just love Julien,” Jeremy gushes. “We’ve known her for so long. I joke that she’s the MVP of our band at this point. A record isn’t complete until we have her on there. She’s such a brilliant singer and a brilliant person. We’re forever honoured.”

Ultimately, though, this is a record all about the core unit of Touché Amoré. From the landslide attack of Disasters to The Glue’s resonant atmospherics, drummer Elliot Babin, bassist Tyler Kirby and guitarists Clayton Stevens and Nick Steinhardt feel absolutely assured, plotting a course back across a 15-year discography to press at their own horizons. On design duties, Nick’s bold artwork – a monochrome photo of the band’s compass-point symbol trailed into the condensation on a widow – takes inspiration from having written and recorded during one of the wettest seasons in Los Angeles history, simultaneously evoking ideas of impermanence and individuality.

Primarily, of course, it’s about Jeremy’s ongoing odyssey and conversations with himself.

Flashing back to opening track Nobody’s, no lyric feels more telling than, ‘So let’s grieve in a forward direction / Neck in neck side by side / As I fixate on the road ahead / It just winds and winds and winds and winds.’

On October 31 it will be 10 years since the death of the frontman’s mother, Sandy, from breast cancer, an event which has inflected Touché’s output since. Receiving that awful news at Gainesville’s The Fest – a story heartbreakingly immortalised on 2016’s New Halloween – put a cloud over one of the band’s favourite cities and they have not returned since. Having insisted their agent land the booking, they make their return to The Fest later this month.

“I don’t want to think about Gainesville in the way I have the last 10 years,” Jeremy reckons. “I want to think about it the way I used to when playing The Fest was one of my favourite things to do. It’s going to be a whirlwind of emotion. In every grief situation, you like to think you can move on. But it’s a pipe dream. All you can try to do is understand it and learn that it’s a powerful thing.”

In the end, the same could apply to Touché Amoré. Nothing makes Jeremy prouder than seeing the passion of fans who’re invested in the band’s music, from first album to last, but that’s a bi-product of what he’s trying to achieve. Even after all these years, it’s still about purging the storm inside.

“I’m so wrapped up in trying to get out what I’m going through, or trying to make sense of what I’m going through,” he says. “Just because I’m writing about what I’m going through in the moment doesn’t mean that I have a clear idea of what that is. Even still, I’m learning from songs I wrote years ago. So it might be years after this record comes out that I’m playing these songs live and lyrics will reveal themselves to me. ‘That’s what I was trying to say!’ But that I’m still learning from my own music really speaks to the beauty in expression!”

Through trauma, tears and tumult, it’s a self-education worth following every step of the way.

Spiral In A Straight Line is released on October 4 via Rise

Read this next:

• Hope Springs Eternal: Touché Amoré’s search for a light at the end of the tunnel
  
• Watch Touché Amoré remind us of the power of live music in The K! Pit
• Terror’s Scott Vogel: “I was pissed off and a little bit lost, and when I found hardcore it gave me a place to belong”