Steinhardt and Stevens are often more likely to back up Bolm’s screams with ultra-clean guitar effects and melodic arpeggios. Guitarists Nick Steinhardt and Clayton Stevens know when to stamp their foot down on the distortion pedal, but Touché Amoré’s heaviness comes more from its emotional lyrical matter than it does headbanging riffs. “Leaving your mark is just too much to ask / I’ll just bow my head and leave out the back”, Bolm yells on Is Survived By opening number “Just Exist”. …To the Beat of a Dead Horse and 2011’s Parting the Sea Between Brightness and Me bear many of hardcore and emo’s requisite traits: mosh pit-inducing riffs, angsty screaming, and lyrics that read like they came from a secret journal. Touché Amoré’s last LP, 2013’s Is Survived By, is a major sonic progression from the band. Not that the band hasn’t already proven itself several cuts above the easy stereotypes of screamo bands. On Stage Four Touché Amoré is well past that point.

The genres labels that Touché Amoré is typically associated with – hardcore, screamo, and the like – are commonly used to signpost the music of youth, of the adolescent screaming his existential woes. “You get to your late-20s, early-30s, people start passing away,” Bolm told Spin in an interview related to the premiere of Stage Four‘s incredible and cathartic finale, “Skyscraper”, a duet with Julien Baker. The union of these two events is fortuitous: the band is maturing alongside Bolm, who after his mother passed was forced to mature in a way that only death can inspire. Stage Four is a reference both to her disease and the album being Touché Amoré’s fourth release. The album chronicles his process of grieving over the death of his mother, who passed away from cancer on Halloween 2014.

This is consistent with the life experience that motivated Bolm’s storytelling on Stage Four. But just five songs later, Bolm confesses, “There is no dress rehearsal / Just a script that I never read… Is it curtains already? / I haven’t learned my lines.” So much has changed for Bolm in so little time.

Heartsickness is perhaps the foundational subject of Touché Amoré’s music just four records into a career that began with 2009’s …To the Beat of a Dead Horse, the band sounds well-rehearsed in that subject indeed. After clean guitar leads give way to a stampede of distorted guitars and pummeled drums on “Flowers and You”, the opening track on Touché Amoré’s fourth studio LP Stage Four, vocalist Jeremy Bolm screams, “I’m heartsick/ and well rehearsed!” He is not inaccurate in that estimation.

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