Review Summary: Bringing emo to the present: amidst the struggle, above the competition.
“If change could happen, I would change it, you know”
It’s only March, but 2025 has felt as do-or-die a year in these United States [citation needed] as any in recent memory. Same circus, accelerated stakes: while institutions vilify diversity and greenlight deportations without due process, every non-normative demographic in my home country has become a scapegoat for the power-hungry, and as of this writing, no pushback seems organized or influential enough to do anything about it. There was a time our current decline seemed closer to a worst-case hypothetical than a plausible new normal. Quaint, wasn’t it? Sunnier days and brighter horizons, freedoms of movement and speech taken fully for granted in the throes of complacent youth? I used to think hope was something akin to clutching the peace of those memories and never letting go of it, but nostalgia for a yesteryear that may or may not have ever existed is partially what sent us spiraling into rampant fascism, so hope will have to stem from somewhere else for a while. Truth, conscientiousness, and love, too—everything positive matters more now. Extreme times call for extreme countermeasures.
Of these seemingly endless epistemological snares, catching emo music up to the ills of the age probably shouldn’t be anyone’s utmost priority, but Cleveland quartet Bee Hive Ski Race inadvertently fast-tracked a system upgrade to the genre in the form of their debut LP,
Unlimited Violence Apologia. Tending to emo’s supposed refuge as a breeding ground for catharsis (where else do public confession and personal poetry collide so well?), the band’s self-coined descriptor “progressive emo” takes the blueprint a few steps further, largely eschewing the rudimentary arpeggios and sun-baked veneers characteristic of the genre’s most recent mid-life doldrums. If they didn’t adopt that cause intentionally, they’re leading its charge anyway, fighting the good fight on two fronts: amidst entrenched sociopolitical struggle and at a proficiency well above their in-genre competition.
Anyway, apologies for burying the lede, but
Unlimited Violence Apologia might be the most accomplished debut record I’ve heard from a rock band since the start of the decade. The ground these Ohioans cover in just under an hour is riveting, immersive, decisive, holistic, and just as rewarding with repeated exposure as it is on spin number one. Playing fast and loose with indie rock’s propensity for sidewinding arrangements, the four-piece surveil several adjacent styles’ foundations and sift for gold from their extremities, traversing, at various points and among other influences, noise rock’s muddiest trenches, post-rock’s most towering summits, and shoegaze’s most buoyant fuzz.
They’ve unearthed the real thing, too. Skeptics should first peep “Gish Gallop,” a lumbering romp whose Chat Pile-esque snapshot of Rust Belt neighborhood terror warps Nick Robles’ bunker alarm bass and maniacal vocalizations into an utter nightmare, anchored only by a chorus that jumpscares you for two bars of air every so often before cannonballing back down the sewage drain. In its wake, “QueeQueg’s Psalm” takes the form of a conspicuously empty, bass-heavy grunge lamentation. Three tracks earlier, “Glittter” proudly channels dream pop a la My Bloody Valentine and wrangles a hookier hook than you’ll find in most of that band’s (and all of their copycats’) discographies. Between them, “Fahrenheit” conjures peak skramz desolation stripped of voice, grief evoked solely through barren chord progressions, flickering guitar ambience, and a tempo acceleration so methodical and tightly wound that its fraying point encroaches on the uncanny valley. These tracks form
Unlimited Violence Apologia’s most adventurous stretch, and it comes early, only preceded by advance single/album opener “Entomological Field Research,” a queer trauma dialogue that grounds the remainder of the album by adapting the takeaway of The Hotelier’s intersectional, walls-come-crashing-in opus
Home, Like NoPlace Is There onto an even more unsustainable day-to-day reality.
After the first half’s effective aphelion, Bee Hive Ski Race embrace a less surprising but no less thrilling tug-of-war with emo convention. “1.4.0./1.12.1” is a whirlpool of romance, regret, recourse, and (don’t laugh)
World of Warcraft references (okay, laugh a little), contemplating the passage of time in communal spaces, online or otherwise. Late-album combo “Carrier” and “Hurricane” indulges in a few archetypal guitar noodles, but only in service of benevolent explosions shortly afterward—the former’s bridge yields one of the genre’s most rousing highlights in years, and it immediately segues into the latter track’s lump-in-throat bargaining for quality time with a sick loved one. Closer “Heifer” doesn’t try one-upping these predecessors, instead bowing the album out with an ominous march through stale morning air, sun peering over the horizon and illuminating the stifling, soulless sprawl beneath it. Through the prickly ascent and the feisty comedown,
Unlimited Violence Apologia’s roving inclinations find stability through contrast; its songs cherry-pick morsels of pin-sharp shock, sorrow, anger, and coerced adjustment, drawing and quartering their respective emotions in narratives that rotate between character study, autobiography, and abstract scene-setting.
It's charming and a little comical then that the album’s crowning moment comes not from one of its many weary affirmations of identity or vivid brushstrokes of dystopia, but from six spare words nestled in the eye of the storm. After four and a half minutes of instrumental jamming, the droning guitars and tasty drum groove of “Exhibitionism” briefly stutter into feedback, and someone—I’m not sure who—exasperatedly howls
“HEY, THE SONG’S NOT FUCKING OVER.” Before you have the chance to chuckle, scoff, or raise a brow, the band instantly careens forward, re-entering in brickwalled unison and momentarily levitating above all of
Unlimited Violence Apologia’s surrounding anguish, thrust solely by their collective compulsion to not let a precious moment of self-determination slip through their fingers. I know the feeling. Most debuts settle for showing potential, but who’s to say if those aspiring artists will ever harness the time or freedom to realize their promise? Controlling the present is hard enough, and Bee Hive Ski Race are seizing theirs from the start. No delay. No half-measures. Go big, transcend home.
Change can happen, you know.
