Chrome Lakes - Death at the Opera House (2023)

Chrome Lakes unlocks a big sound with their third record, Death at the Opera House. Heavy yet melodic guitars and an aggressive rhythm section merge with pop sensibilities, showcasing the band’s ability to walk the line between their more hardcore and pop tendencies. The record offers songs that are both working class anthems and earnest explorations of grief and suffering. The songs are rebelliously hopeful though, and their blistering guitars feel beefed up, harkening the second half of the 90’s distortion like Hum and White Pony era Deftones.

These songs are wild and frantic, chasing down a feeling about finding humanity in a world glitched out, jacked in, and still barely kicking. Each track harnesses the alienation and frustration of a generation living through gig economies, endless war, unsatisfying labor, and proliferating grief. You can feel it in the songs, even before the lyrics kick in. But sonically this band remains cohesive and patient. It’s easy for a band to yell about the disillusionment and the failures of the world, but it’s hard for a band to do it well—something Chrome Lakes leans into with the practiced hands of a collective. The potential chaos of each song is harnessed by a patience that comes from the band's maturity and collaborative approach.

Unlike a lot of bands who lose their angst and soften over time, Chrome Lakes turns up, plays harder, and produces a record that showcases a crystalized realization of their sound. Sometimes heavier, sometimes chunkier, sometimes faster, held together by their collaborative spirit and Chad Fox’s crooning storytelling. The lyrics circle around the need to escape and the need to fight for the people we love. There is a trauma-bonded kind of trust unfolding in these songs, and so there isn’t a rush to get out of the songs. Experience tells them to wait, let the song end organically. Maybe Fox and the band have a lot to say, the angst of their previous records having evolved into a kind of anger, but the record is not full of resentment or bitterness or even righteousness, but hopefulness. Though grief finds us and death is always lurking, these songs tell us, we can make it if we find our people. The songs tell us to mourn and heal, then find companionship in this gutted out ride through the future-present of a dying world toward a future ripe with the possibility for change.