Deeper - Auto-Pain (2020)

Following two years after their eponymous debut, Auto-Pain marks a tonal shift into darker and sparser territory for Chicago post-punks Deeper. The jagged, anxious, but still organic feel that marked their first effort has given way to a harsher, almost mechanical approach that utilizes open space and repetition as a means to work through rather than stave off suffering. Initially conceived as an interconnected concept album, singer/guitarist Nic Gohl claims that he took inspiration from Aldous Huxley's dystopian classic Brave New World, in which a fictional government-issued drug called soma was used to numb all unwanted emotions. Gohl derived the idea of "Auto-Pain" as its antithesis, a system by which to amplify and fully experience and subsequently process emotions. Although the conceptual elements of the album were ultimately abandoned, it dictated a new way of working for the band, who stripped down their already lean sound to its wiry minimum. Songs like "This Heat" and "V.M.C." have plenty of potent energy, relying on glassy guitar riffs and occasional stabs of percussion and synths as punctuation and color. An unintended emotional arc of Auto-Pain is the part-time presence of founding guitarist Michael Clawson, whose mental health struggles caused him to leave the band halfway through recording and ultimately take his own life. While Gohl, bassist Drew McBride, and drummer Shiraz Bhatti are careful to point out that the material was completely finished before Clawson's passing, its themes of pain, struggle, and depression seemed even more desperate after his passing. In spite of its subject matter and the trauma Deeper endured in its making, Auto-Pain lacks the standout cuts and live immediacy of its predecessor. Their debut's ferocity stands in contrast to this album's detached anguish, though there is still plenty of craft and pathos among its 12 tracks.