Cursive – Devourer

★★★☆

Released September 13th on Run For Cover Records

Cursive have always been one of Those Bands. You know the type. You heard them once back in college, some album that your roommate had that came from some label you’d never heard of. For me that was Domestica (Saddle Creek), for a lot of you that was probably 2003’s The Ugly Organ, as close to a breakthrough as the band would really ever get. At the time there were a lot of those kind of post-hardcore bands out – it was the era, after all – but there was something a bit different about Tim Kasher’s songwriting. Something a little more heartfelt than his contemporaries, if that was even possible, but better able to straddle good hooks and deeper inner meaning than, say, the Get-Up Kids.

Like so many great bands then and now, you probably lost track of them after The Ugly Organ. Their 2006 followup Happy Hollow was worthy but fell through the cracks (the P4K 6.7 probably didn’t help). Well, it’s now 2024 and time to check in with Kasher and friends again. They have a new album! They’ve had a fair few new albums, as it turns out. Some of them even charted, slightly. Spread the news to the coolest weird people you know. That’s meant truly; every very cool odd person I ever met at some point revealed themselves to be a Cursive fan. I don’t know what it is about the band, but they attract some very interesting people.

How is Devourer, though? Honestly, pretty good. The songwriting is intact, the band is willing to play with form and function, and there’s a solid theme running through the whole thing. As it turns out, the way we consume things, especially art but especially each other, has a great deal of control on our actions and identities. Not all of it works, of course. There are some clunky lines here and there, and the production has a bass-forward modern sheen to it that is a bit off-putting when compared to their older work. They are on Run For Cover, though, so I guess it comes with the territory. If you forgot about Cursive, though, checking out Devourer is probably the third-best thing you can do with your day, and that’s high praise.