How The Cure & Nick Cave Inspired Touchè Amorè's New Album, ‘Spiral In A Straight Line’

American post-hardcore band Touché Amoré come bearing the gift of their newest album, Spiral In A Straight Line, today. The album, released via Rise Records and BMG, marks the band’s sixth album together and first full-length project in four years. 

Produced by Ross Robinson and featuring collaborations with Julien Baker and Lou Barlow, Spiral In A Straight Line is “A song and record about forward movement while everything around you becomes destabilized”, states leading man Jeremy Bolm. 

Their last record, Lament, was washed around with the turbulent years of the pandemic, disturbing the band’s ability to tour and write.

Bolm described the project as a “love album”. The latest release flips the narrative this time, focusing on the powerful and sometimes uncomfortable sensation of grit and fighting through the “emotional debris” of life. 

The album’s opening track, Nobody’s, has already been hailed as a “melodic hardcore gem.” Meanwhile, Hal Ashby also enjoys success at the top of the band’s streaming profiles. 

Touché’s frontman Jeremy Bolm stopped by to take fans behind the scenes on the new release, name-dropping Robert Smith, Nick Cave, and Leonard Cohen as a few of the big stars to grace subtleties in the record-making process. Without further ado, Bolm takes us through the band’s newest gift:

1. A Brush With The Cure

For the first fact, we asked Robert Smith to do a feature. He politely declined, but he at least knows that we exist - and that’s enough for me! Ross Robinson had produced an album for The Cure in the mid-2000s, and when we were thinking about specific guests that we could potentially have do something on this album, we were like: what’s a big swing?

Ross just very casually said, “Well, what if we asked Robert?”. And we were like, “...yes, absolutely!”. So, Ross wrote him an email and he responded, basically like, “thank you for the invite, unfortunately I’m not doing any features at the moment. Are you producing them right now?”. And he wrote our name in all caps and italics. The fact that we got italics - he’s aware that we exist! I can’t be mad that he declined either; I never would’ve expected it to happen in the first place. The fact that he even responded is really nice.

2. Eddie Van Halen’s Amp

One of the guitar amps that Clayton [Stevens] tracked on was one of Eddie Van Halen’s. When I asked Clayton what the backstory was there, he said that Eddie Van Halen’s guitar tech had passed away. And when Ross’s friend went to pick up his amp after the tech had passed away, his amp was gone. And the wife basically said to just go ahead and take one of Eddie’s; he won’t miss it. I mean, he probably has a hundred fucking amps, so one won’t be missed. But because of that, Ross was able to get that amp himself, and Clayton tracked with it on this album.

3. The Mic That Spans Nick Cave To Leonard Cohen

The microphone that I tracked vocals on is the same mic that Ross has used for every single one of his records. That obviously includes Korn and Slipknot, Glassjaw and those sorts of bands. But this is where it excites me: aside from all of that, it also originally belonged to Nick Cave. And Leonard Cohen tracked the album The Future on it. And that’s my guy! When I was first told that, the first time I worked with him, I was basically like, “I’m going to ruin this thing by yelling into it!”. That’s another crazy thing that I just can’t believe is real.

4. A Time Travelling Riff

The single Nobody’s is the first song that I have written or brought music to the band with; usually, they write all the music. Everybody was contributing in different ways. But the thing that I brought in, I had had that for a really, really long time.

I first wrote it for the band Thursday. Thursday were making a record about 12 years ago or whatever it was. Geoff [Rickly], their singer, came to L.A. to have a writing session with me just because he wanted a separate set of ears on it. I wrote that original riff from Nobody’s with Thursday in mind, but they ended up not using it - which is completely chill!

But I always liked it, and I kept it to the side and just had it for myself. Then when we were writing this record, I brought it to the band and was like, “hey, here’s this thing that I wrote a really long time ago, I don’t know if we want to use it?”. And that then became Nobody’s. Obviously, this song went through some changes once everybody in the band started working on it, but I like where it eventually ended up.

5. Before The Final Version of Finalist

There’s a song on this record called Finalist, which originally I had written completely different lyrics for. Those lyrics are still on a demo version, but basically it was the fastest I’d ever written a song - ever!

I wrote it in 10 minutes, which never happens for me. The song is very much a response to how hard it is to be in a band and to be an artist these days when it comes to having to talk into your phone and be all of the things that you weren’t supposed to be, or having to rely on analytics to tell you how things are going, or having to pay fees to reach your fans.

All of the hardships that come with being an artist and how upsetting it is - that was what the original song was. Then, when we started fully making the record, we were in the studio, and I was like, this song doesn’t make sense on the record anymore. I still believe in everything that I’m saying, but it would feel like such an outlier, kind of like: what is this song? Why is it even on here?

I still liked the music a lot, so I drove myself crazy rewriting it to be more in line with what the record actually is. And when people listen to that song, there is a level of true stress and anxiety that I think you hear in my performance; that is definitely compounded by how much I drove myself crazy rewriting that song!

We do also have a song that we cut from the record that we might use later. An idea that we’ve kicked around is if we put it on a 7” next year, the B-side could potentially be the original version of Finalist. That way we could still put it out and show the different set of lyrics that we still very much stand behind.

Touché Amoré’s latest album is available today via all major streaming services and can be purchased on vinyl and CD via the band’s website.