Album review: Show Me The Body – Alone Together

Having a child changes everything about a person, just ask Show Me The Body’s vocalist Julian Pratt. Speaking on the Identified podcast, he said, “I used to be guided by fear and hate and aggression, that was my vernacular. Now I’m learning how to show strength through love.” It’s a huge statement from the face and voice of one of New York City’s most experimental and furious hardcore bands in recent years, a band that wears the very DNA of NYC on the sleeve of everything they do. Hit play on 2019’s exceptional Dog Whistle, or on 2022’s volatile Trouble The Water and hear the passion, angst, drive and grit in every note.

On Alone Together, they’ve done away with some of their noisier elements. Where past releases sounded like Swans playing the music of Death Grips, this album’s lead singles Dance In The USA and No God display a much more straightforward hardcore groove, allowing Julian’s barked diatribes about systemic failures and controlling your own destiny to be much more potent. Eat For Peace ties into this newfound ethos of showing strength through love with one of SMTB’s biggest choruses to date: 'Radical love, it compels me to fight' is the rallying cry that has arguably been missing in the past.

As a whole, the album embraces both sides. Good Time and Mileage cut with a searing, serrated edge, while tracks like Trust and Do What’s Right (Happy) are incredibly introspective and thought-provoking in their analyses of human conditioning and how we interact.

But it’s the tearjerking See You Again that steals the show. Written about the loss of major figures in Julian’s life and tight-knit circles, every word is a stake to the heart. 'I try to be a man about it / What the fuck even that mean?' he laments in a moment that reflects great personal growth through adversity, while the plucked banjo riff swells with the drums to a rousing dedication to lost loved ones.

Signing off with the full-throated title track, Alone Together firmly plants the record as the best in SMTB's canon. One of post-hardcore’s most consistently exciting and invigorating bands has found a new gear and cemented themselves as a band for everyone, regardless of taste.

Verdict: 4/5

For fans of: Swans, Gulch, Drug Church

Alone Together is released on July 10 via Loma Vista Recordings.

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