Honesty At All Times: Jeremy Bolm Reflects On Touche Amore's 'Stage Four'

It seems like only our parents leave voicemails.

Jeremy Bolm would often already be calling his mother back by the time a buzz from his phone signalled that he had a message waiting from her. Late in the summer of 2014, Sandra Bolm rang her son to let him know that she was dropping off a prescription and that she might not be home when he got there. He didn't pick up, and the message sat unplayed on Jeremy’s phone. It’s now the last thing you hear on Touché Amoré’s new record, ‘Stage Four’.

Sandra died from cancer a couple of months later while her son’s band were on stage for a Halloween set at Fest, a much-loved annual punk festival in Gainesville, Florida. He would eventually tap play on the last voicemail she left him just before they wrapped recording, trying to decide whether including it as a coda to the album's last song, the elegiac Skyscraper, would be “a thing”.

On New Halloween, the album’s second track, Bolm charges himself with a lack of courage for avoiding it, but no-one could reasonably reach the same conclusion looking from the outside in. The record is a gut punch that locks eyes at different times with grief, guilt, anger and religion, but it’s also one that has Bolm’s love for his mother coursing through every minute of it. “I liked that it’s so nonchalant,” he says of the album’s final moments. “It’s nice to hear her voice. It gives her personality to the listener. They’ve heard me sing about this person for this whole record and then they get to hear this person’s voice.”

When the time came to start work on ‘Stage Four’, Bolm didn’t need to tell his bandmates - guitarists Clayton Stevens and Nick Steinhardt, bassist Tyler Kirby and drummer Elliot Babin - what their new record would be about. Within the lyric sheets of the Burbank hardcore band’s previous three LPs he’d always been an open book. But ‘Stage Four’ goes further than that. There are moments of candour here that set the listener back on their heels; asides that cut straight to the core of Bolm’s loss with the same directness he’s previously reserved for analysis of his own imperfections or romantic entanglements.

“I’ve always tried to pour complete honesty into whatever we’re doing, even if it’s potentially hazardous to relationships or my own well-being,” he says. “It’s an overwhelming need to be as straightforward as possible. I’ve always felt that if people are being generous enough to listen to the band that I play in and generous enough to listen to whatever it is I’m singing about then I owe them, the listener, complete transparency. There are so many things they could be listening to. There are a million new songs that come out every day. I felt like it was my priority to be as honest as possible. It’s cathartic. It makes me feel better.”

Surrounding his words on this occasion are some of the most pop-oriented, glimmering songs the band have ever committed to tape. ‘Stage Four’ still kicks like a mule, as its early single Displacement proved, but Touché Amoré’s grasp of hardcore dynamics and explosive hooks has continued to blossom post-’Is Survived By’, an album that broke new melodic ground for them two years ago.

They have always tended to workshop their music over time, letting ideas ferment and often radically altering them in-camera, but here the writing process slipped beyond the tight deadlines observed on previous releases. They would end up refining the songs for the best part of a year before heading into the studio with Brad Wood, a returning character from ‘Is Survived By’ and a producer who counts Liz Phair’s ‘Exile in Guyville’ and Sunny Day Real Estate’s ‘Diary’ as happy bedfellows on his CV. Throughout the process, Bolm was keen to maintain the balance between the gravity of his words and the melodic minerals of the instrumentals. In his mind there was a pop tipping point that they had to stay on the right side of.

“Everybody in the band writes in their own way,” Bolm says. “Between Tyler, Clayton and Nick, I would every now and again say: ‘Remember what the subject matter is. I’m trying to avoid things that are too poppy because I don’t know what I’m going to do over that.’ If there was ever a debate it would be over something like that. They were very considerate and understood what I was trying to do. Nine times out of 10 whatever gets brought to practice ends up being completely different because everyone has such a heavy hand in the music-writing process.

“There are some songs on the record that took a really long time to end up the way they did, which was nice because we’ve never given ourselves as much time as we did with this album. A song like Flowers and You went through so many changes, the same with Displacement. I can listen back to the demos and it’s shocking how much they’ve changed. We’ve never had that much time to take songs apart and make them right.”

Making them right included Bolm taking a new step. ‘Stage Four’ is the first Touché Amoré record to feature his singing voice, notably on Skyscraper, where he duets Leonard Cohen-style with Julien Baker. The decision places him firmly in the sights of hardcore purists, which were recently trained on Ceremony’s Ross Farrar following a similar, if more sustained, shift to clean singing on the post-punk-derived ‘The L-Shaped Man’, but within the context of the album it is resoundingly correct.

Bolm’s voice is a rich counterpoint to his scream and a necessary new string to his bow given the textural differences introduced by his bandmates at a number of junctures. In the studio Wood lent a steadying hand to the vocalist, who took heart from the producer’s past work with MewithoutYou frontman Aaron Weiss on their albums ‘Catch For Us The Foxes’ and ‘Brother, Sister’.

“Certain things were being written that I knew had to stay, but I looked at them and said: ‘I can’t scream over this. This has to be the time I take that leap and work on singing,’” Bolm says. “It’s still daunting. It’s a scary thing for someone who’s never really thought of themselves as anything other than a guy who screams in a punk band. I went and had a couple, I wouldn’t say singing lessons, more like coaching in a way. It was really helpful but a little funny to me. The things I struggle with are all mental.

“The woman was really sweet and explained: ‘You can do it, but when you’re thinking too much or have anxiety about it is when it goes off.’ She was incredibly helpful. I’ve been practising a lot after the record and it’s got my confidence up. Also working with Brad in the studio. He’s got an incredible ear. He would tell me anecdotes about Aaron getting the confidence to sing and that helped me, knowing that he was pretty hands on with getting Aaron to where he is today. He was a great motivator and guided me through everything.”

Bolm’s performance, as a vocalist and lyricist, will live long in the memory. Vital to the enduring power at the heart of ‘Stage Four’ is the manner in which he ricochets between stages of grief and personal snapshots, combining waves of emotion with hyper-specific details of his experience. It is an album that speaks its mind when it feels like it, with its fluid use of time and place giving it a vivid ring of truth. This is not an easy narrative wrapped in a bow. It's real.

At one point, Bolm tells us that he can’t listen to certain songs anymore, specifically I Can't Live Without My Mother's Love from Sun Kil Moon’s ‘Benji’ and Death Cab For Cutie’s What Sarah Said. They're too real now. Fans of the band will recognise a fellow music-lover (Bolm’s record collection is a thing of wonder) hitting a wall that they might in a similar situation. He doesn't hate the songs now. He just crosses the street when they approach.

On Water Damage, meanwhile, we are transported to his family home to see a cracked bedside table, patriotic coffee cups, a TV balanced precariously over the sink while his mother cooks. Bolm seethes with anger at the accompanying sense of absence as he sets about emptying the house, a task that has been woven into the album’s artwork by Steinhardt. “I would not put that on my worst enemy,” Bolm recently said. “It is the worst part.”

But he is perhaps most frank when attacking his own perceived failings, in particular the guilt he feels at having continued to be a “guy in a band” during his mother’s illness. “She passed away about an hour ago,” he screams on Eight Seconds. “While you were on stage living the dream.” The fact that he continued to tour with her enthusiastic blessing is of little comfort to a bereaved son. After seeing the band early on at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, Sandra and Bolm’s brother became avid supporters. Once she fell ill, that didn’t change.

When Bolm looks at himself, the listener is forced to confront pressures they likely also place on themselves: to be a responsible and caring person, to make their parents proud, to give back. When he speaks of his mother, meanwhile, they must place his words in a context they can understand personally.

Throughout, these feelings intertwine with the more abstract idea of religious guilt. Bolm was raised in a Christian household and went to a Christian private school during his formative years, but broke from that when he began to meet people with different beliefs after switching to a public school. His mother, though, remained devout throughout her life. After her death, Bolm was faced by his own scepticism, fury at what he saw as her God’s dereliction of duty and, underneath it all, the hope that she was right and there was something waiting on the other side. “You died at 69 with a body full of cancer,” he screams to open Displacement. “I asked your God: ‘How could you?’ But never heard an answer.”

“It becomes this unspoken awkwardness where you go your own way but your parents don’t want to believe that you’ve gone your own way,” Bolm says. “It’s the elephant in the room. Whenever her and I would get on the subject it would get uncomfortable pretty quickly. I would do my duty as the nice son. I would go with her to church on Christmas Eve and Easter, the big holidays, because I knew it would make her happy. Usually there was a drive home from the event on the subject of why I wasn’t singing along.

“As her illness got worse there were more conversations about it and a lot more heavy conversations, to where it made an impact on me. Religious guilt is a real thing. I grew up going to church and I know the Bible. Even when I say out loud ‘I do not believe in God’ there’s always going to be something in the back of my brain. Like, the hands-on-the-hips, head turned: ‘Are you sure?’ It’s built in, which is strange.

"I don’t believe in that stuff, but I’d like to for her sake. If anybody deserves to be in Heaven it’s her. She was a devout Christian forever. If Heaven is real and all it’s cracked up to be, then that’s what I hope for her. Then there’s the tangle of why someone who’s is such a devout Christian, and gave her whole life to all of this, should have to go through something so horrid? How can I not be angry? It’s not right.”

Bolm has written about death before, even facing up to his own on ‘Is Survived By’, but never like this. ‘Stage Four’ is a piece of work that can be admired from an intellectual remove, but to find that level of detachment is difficult given the emotional weight it carries. Touché Amoré have always been a band with catharsis at the centre of their orbit - spend five minutes at one of their shows to get that rubber stamped - but here they communicate things often left unspoken. It seems a little glib to thank Bolm for sharing, but that’s what you’ll feel compelled to do.

'Stage Four' is out on September 16 through Epitaph.

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