I essentially started listening to music in around 2007 on a healthy diet of Tooth and Nail adjacent bands. At the time, this was “music” to me. As I got older I branched out into a broader landscape of contemporary music, never contemplating much where I started. Looking back, I see this as a fairly niche moment in “alternative rock” that started in the mid 2000s after the settling of emo music into the almost-mainstream, and died out with the greater mass extinction of guitar rock in the early 2010s. By the time I had the awareness to see my own origins in the context of a greater history of music, I didn’t care.
I’m still not well able to describe what made those records unique to this day. The “Tooth and Nail” sound wasn’t exclusive to the label, though I think there was a particular distillation endemic to a lot of the “Christian rock” bands at the time. But it existed outside of this subset of alternative rock/pop punk bands as well in groups like Manchester Orchestra and Cartel (but especially the Mae/Anberlin group). Among the most distinctive characteristics that I’ve been able to parse out was a willingness to write pop vocal melodies and sing them like you wanted to be famous. These bands were hyper lead-singer-centric with borderline cult of personality appeals. Some of the production and instrumental choices played this up too (this era has always had a very specific production to me, which I have never been able to articulate whatsoever). There was also an overemphasis on being catchy before all else (except being thoughtful). Beyond these vague distinctions, what it was that made all of those bands sound different from what came before and after them has eluded me to this day.
The antithesis of this is the newly-coined “sparklepunk”, which only came about as a term around ~2017 but I think can be traced back to the first emo revival bands such as Snowing, Algernon Cadwallader, and The Brave Little Abacus. When emo rebooted with What It Takes To Move Forward by Empire! Empire! (I Was A Lonely Estate) in 2009 it seemed as though things would pick up right where they left off before the first emo/pop punk merger (think Taking Back Sunday), but that’s not really what happened. As it became clear that there was a pretty low ceiling on this wave of emo (the peak being maybe The Hotelier’s Home, Like Noplace Is There), it became much more about just having fun and less about ambition. Emo became goofy instead of nerdy, and by the mid 2010s pop punk had overtaken post-hardcore as the genre’s most common secondary descriptor. Where this led was a sparklepunk scene with an immense amount of participants, but notably lacking in starpower. Emo basically went back to where pop punk was in the 90s--lots of stoner bands making albums of earnest but sometimes borderline-joke songs. I admit I mostly lost interest.
Vocalist Ryland Heagy is greatly to thank just because he is simply a more talented singer than most of his peers, and they let him take center stage often. He isn’t afraid to let his voice sound “pretty” sometimes, which strangely enough feels like something that has run out of favor the last few years. Origami Angel are a 2 piece, so there’s a lot of spotlight for one person to have available to steal. Good recording, short peppy songs, and multiple vocal tracks make the lack of personnel almost shockingly unnoticeable.
Some songs lean more towards modern—”666 Flags” ends with a string of furious blast beats—and others sound much more like throwbacks. “The Title Track” could be slowed down to fit on Forget and Not Slow Down or a Sherwood album and sound right at home. The closer “The Air Up Here” bursts open and rides out similarly to its analog “Firefly” on Saves The Day’s Stay What You Are. Half the time though it’s hardly noticeable when one song ends and the next begins. Within songs, they’re pairing the spastic instrumentation and song structures of 2010s emo with the dramatic vocal melodies of 2000s emo. That’s what's most impressive about Somewhere City, is that not only have Origami Angel honed such an interesting sound, but that they’ve executed it so tightly. It perfectly walks the line between “loose” and “mature” that oftentimes bands only find once in a career.
And yeah, I think it is entirely plausible that this will be the peak for them, as much as I love this album it seems like a lightning strike that will be immensely difficult to replicate. If you are like me and came of age in late 2000s alternative/pop punk, this is probably one of the best and first nostalgia pieces to come out of it. Somewhere City is indisputably one of the best pop punk or emo albums to come out since, and it reveals a lot of what it was that made me love those records 10+ years ago in the first place. Catchy songs written, sung, and executed well will always play, even if they are sometimes about Danny Phantom. Relient K early on had a hooky song about mood rings. You never know where this will take them next.