Writing about your love/hate relationship with your hometown is a hardcore right of passage, with the likes of As Friends Rust bemoaning the Gainesville pressure cooker on ‘Half Friend Town’ and the need to get on the road on ‘Tight Like Strings’.
Like As Friends Rust, One Step Closer also come from a storied hardcore town – in their case Wilkes-Barre (home to Title Fight and Cold War amongst others) – and are the latest to put their hometown on blast as they contend with the security of a scene and the scrutiny that comes with wanting to play stages around the world.
Yet Title Fight aren’t the primary source of inspiration for One Step Closer’s sound. Instead, there’s a clear love of 90s melodic hardcore, youth crew and old-fashioned emo, and these all spill out at appropriate moments during ‘This Place You Know’.
The likes of ‘Time Spent, Too Long’, ‘Pringle Street’ and ‘Chrysanthemum’ are all prime slices of progressive melodic hardcore, rich with vocal layers, musical urgency, and insidious hooks. But when One Step Closer let rip – like on ‘Leave Me Behind’ and ‘Autumn’ – they produce a sound so intense and powerful it could blow the roof off even the biggest of festival tents.
But there’s more to One Step Closer than straight-up hardcore, and on ‘Hereafter’ they show their sensitive side with devastatingly beautiful effect. An ode to vocalist Ryan Savitski’s late grandmother, it’s the beating heart centrepiece of an album that is everything hardcore should be in 2021.
