Movements: Happier Now
Fans of Californian post-hardcore band Movements have reason to celebrate, as the band’s fourth LP, Happier Now, out on the 4th of September via Fearless Records, is everything you could wish for and more. The album is the perfect marriage between their older and newer material, with the band considering it a full-circle moment. Some songs are a throwback to their earlier work, while many more serve as a logical evolution of their sound, bringing together everything they have explored over the course of 40 minutes.
The album opens with Pulse, an atmospheric track about purpose and vicious self-repeating cycles that begins with the line, “Is it worth it… is it worth it anymore?” It’s the ideal prequel to lead single ‘Dissolve Me’, an introspective tearjerker that deals with internal emotional struggles and feels destined to become an absolute belter to sing along to in the pits. Things step up another notch with ‘Everything is Fine’, which centres around overwhelming anxiety and self-doubt, accompanied by a really cool guitar riff. With its strong post-hardcore elements, it’s sure to be another great pit-mover.
The title track, ‘Happier Now’, once again sees the band doing what they do best: introspecting. I don’t want to give too much away because it’s the song I’ve grown to love the most since getting my hands on the album, but I will say that it offers a listening experience that I think will be incredibly memorable for many people, especially during the bridge. ‘Flowerbeds’ doesn’t let up on the emotional intensity either, as lead singer Patrick Miranda sings about darkness and how it affects his relationships. Another single, ‘Back in My Ways’, follows, a song Miranda admits to hating at first before it eventually grew on him. This might be the album at its most subjective because, for me, it scratched an itch I didn’t even know I had almost immediately. It’s quintessential post-hardcore in the best sense, throwing back to the band’s earlier work more than any other song on the album.
After the interlude ‘Spellbound’, with its slow guitars and haunting vocals, comes ‘Ill At Ease’, where the band simply captures magic. It starts loud before progressing into progressive guitars and an explosive drum beat from Spencer York, while Miranda is arguably at his most vulnerable on the album. The latest single, ‘Live by the Sword’, sounds very different from the rest of the record, with muted vocals and Miranda singing about anger and betrayal rather than himself.
The next track, ‘Everyone I’ve Ever Been’, is perhaps the only song on the album that didn’t quite work for me, at least initially. I found its opening a little jarring, especially coming off the back of the previous track, but it eventually pays off with a really cool, loud chorus. The penultimate track, ‘Fragile Hands’, is noticeably slower than the rest, which suits its subject matter perfectly before it eventually explodes into an outpouring of emotion. It’s another brilliant tearjerker that wouldn’t feel out of place among the band’s earliest work. The final track, ‘Separate’, which has also already been released as a single, is the best possible culmination of everything that comes before it, with Miranda delivering his most honest expression of his struggles as an artist, leaving the listener feeling euphoric and shaken at the same time.
It seems to me that the band struck gold by using the first two singles to help define the writing of the rest of the album. The end result is slightly ironic, in the best possible sense: we’re left with an album about searching for meaning, identity, and purpose, from a band that has grown into a space they are now incredibly confident occupying. As they acknowledge in the album’s press release, they have embraced becoming ‘veterans’ of the scene they grew up in. The band has said they stepped into the record without knowing what the end product would sound like, but, in my view, this is exactly the album a fan could want – an evolution that embraces every direction their sound has travelled while still feeling unmistakably like Movements.