Posthardcore giants Young Widows return with all the menace but less baggage

When you’re not in a good place, it can help to listen to music by somebody who sounds like they’re not in a good place. I love lots of those records, and Young Widows have made a few of the best. Guitarist and front man Evan Patterson and bassist Nick Thieneman founded this Louisville trio in 2006, and drummer Jeremy McMonigle has been aboard since 2008. With Settle Down City (2006) and Old Wounds (2008), they developed a dark, fraught, obsessive style of posthardcore that perfectly evokes the experience of trying so hard to hold onto something precious that you break it in your hands. Its stubborn repetitions feel like worrying at a bloody hangnail, and its unpredictable spasms—a jarring eruption of noise, a dropout like the floor falling away—feel like living in a brain that snaps your consciousness around at the end of a whip. Patterson’s voice sounds forlorn and desperate, not angry or unhinged, but he and his bandmates do more than anybody since the Jesus Lizard with the tension between locked-down rhythms and unstable menace. 

In March, though, when Young Widows released Power Sucker (Temporary Residence), they hadn’t put out an album of new material in 11 years. A lot can happen in that much time. The band had already evolved on In and Out of Youth and Lightness (2011) and Easy Pain (2014), with longer, more hypnotic songs that feel wrung out and exhausted, like an animal left to struggle in a trap for days. For most of the past ten years, Patterson has been more focused on his solo project, Jaye Jayle (he released After Alter in January), whose approach to noise rock has a drawling, southern Gothic feel—as though a Bad Seeds record appeared to you on a dark backcountry road, through a windshield pelted with rain. So what do Young Widows sound like now? 

“Every other Young Widows album was about the vortex and my depressions,” Patterson told Post-Trash last month, surprising no one. But in 2021, while going through his second divorce, he started microdosing mushrooms every day—and he kept it up for nine months. “My anxiety pretty much went away,” he said. “I was paying bills on time, calling people, taking care of my responsibilities.” His first child, Leonard Pitch Black Patterson, was born last year. “Prior to having Lenny, I didn’t really care what happened to me that much,” he said. “It opened the door to being a little more selfless, wanting to share and take care of everyone a little bit more.”

Starting a family also helped Patterson chill out about the fact that Thieneman and McMonigle’s child-rearing responsibilities had put a brake on Young Widows, which he admits he’d been a “bitter dickhead” about in the past. They started getting together at Patterson’s house at 10 AM each Friday to work on a new record. To make their limited time count, they wrote faster and consciously tried to avoid getting too finicky. Power Sucker has less of the perversity in detail and structure that makes Old Wounds such an enervating trip, but the sound will instantly scratch the same itch: wiry, gleaming guitar, grotty outboard bass, and bludgeoning drum parts heavy on the toms. You can hear more Kentucky in Patterson’s voice, and the songs—which are back down to three minutes or so, on average—sometimes even have a touch of bar-band swagger. The production is more “live in a room,” with less of the wild panning, dramatic spatial effects, and mine-shaft reverb from the earlier records. You won’t mistake the reborn Young Widows for a power-pop band—this is still nasty, bleak, aggressive music—but you might find it easier to believe they’re having fun. The title track seems to be about steering clear of energy vampires: “I am not the kind / To waste my power on your misery,” Patterson sings. And on “Turned Out Alright,” he says something that would probably surprise his old self: “Turned out all right for a punk-rock kid.” 

Young Widows share this Beat Kitchen bill with underappreciated Bay Area noise rockers Kowloon Walled City and Louisville darkwave group Fotocrime, led by former Coliseum front man Ryan Patterson (Evan’s older brother) and also including Thieneman.

 Young Widows Kowloon Walled City and Fotocrime open. Fri 5/23, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 2100 W. Belmont, $20, 17+