The story of BEN QUAD is punctuated by moments of randomness: a chance meeting via Craigslist bonding over bands like Microwave and Modern Baseball. An out-of-nowhere name drop from indie tastemaker Ian Cohen lauding their debut album, 2022’s I’m Scared That’s All There Is. A one-off sonic curveball that somehow turned into their biggest song – and, without them realizing it at the time, a brand-new freedom to reinvent themselves.
But serendipity has done more than bring Ben Quad here, to the release of WISHER, their first LP for Pure Noise Records: It’s taught them to thrive inside the unpredictable, to harness a no-limits musical mentality and self-effacing sense of humor and turn it into some of the most resonant, captivating emo of today. Well, actually, post-emo.
“This is our love letter to the genre,” singer/guitarist Sam Wegrzynski says of the album. “It’s an amalgamation of all the shit emo kids like: screaming, synths, pop sensibilities all mixed with crazy emotional stuff. What’s post-emo if not the next evolution?”
The Oklahoma City-based quartet have always been evolving. I’m Scared That’s All There Is cemented them as a force in the modern emo movement, landing them on bills with the likes of Hot Mulligan and Knuckle Puck. The standalone single “You’re Part of It” added a harder, screamo-tinged edge to their sound, while an outpouring of support to a social media shitpost declaring “If ‘You’re Part of It’ gets 10K streams by Wednesday, we’ll put out a screamo EP” took them even further down that road with Ephemera, their 2024 EP. (The song currently boasts more than 4 million streams.) Now, with Wisher, the band deliver a true follow-up to their debut that fully embraces everything that’s followed it since.
The 10 songs on Wisher find Wegrzynski, Edgar Viveros (lead guitar), Henry Shields (bass/backing vocals) and Isaac Young (drums) pulling from every corner of their record collections: jagged punk riffs, glassy math-rock, sticky pop hooks and glitchy production that push toward something futuristic. But rather than a scattershot collage, these elements recur as motifs – a melody here, a guitar line there – stitched together with purpose and intention.
First single “It’s Just A Title” serves up a groove factory complemented by smooth vocals and lifting keyboards, while the frantic “Painless” rips through speakers with the ferocity and melodicism of They’re Only Chasing Safety-era Underoath, if their guitarists spent more time studying Midwest emo than metalcore. “Did You Decide to Skip Arts and Crafts” welcomes Treaty Oak Revival singer Sam Canty – and a well-placed banjo – onto a genre-blending Tumblr-era throwback, “Classic Case of Dead Guy on the Ground” ascends with a preposterously sublime falsetto hook, and the brooding “West of West” brings things full circle for the band with a cameo from Microwave’s Nathan Hardy.
Macseal
