Soft Kill 'Dead Kids, R.I.P. City' Album Tops Billboard Alternative Charts

Soft Kill had been growing with pretty much every record, but a deep maturation achieving a level of emotional intensity that even for a band known exactly that, was nothing inspiring and inarguably a high water mark. The question then, was how do they possibly follow that up? Tobias Grave, Conrad Vollmer, Owen Glendower, Daniel Deleon and Nicole Colbath have put any such concerns commandingly to rest with their new album 'Dead Kids, R.I.P. City,' out now on Cercle Social Records/Cobraside.

Desperate, redemptive, its contrast of light and shadow favoring the latter, Dead Kids, R.I.P. City is like no other album in the genre, featuring the brave and abandoned, the tender and the afflicted, all teetering in memory on the edge of the city. For all the sadness and pain of addiction haunting it, however, the record, by its very existence, proves that hope doesn't necessarily win but that, even if at great cost, it can. It's what makes the album so powerful beyond just the scope of its dark luminous sound and indelible melodies, and is one of the many reasons you'll carry it with you.

A story odyssey of sorts told in ten parts, ten songs - each track essentially a character - Dead Kids, R.I.P City, produced by David Trumfio (Built To Spill, Wilco) and mastered by the legendary Howie Weinberg (The Cure, Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana), explores, through a beguiling mix of personal memory, allegory, and narrative structures by turns both poetic and stinging, a long and complicated relationship with a dark version of Portland OR. It's songs that tell of the fractured and fragile legacies of those lost during the city's last couple decades as it moves from soggy backwater to unheard of growth and tech-fueled transformation.

From the frantic cascade of guitar that carries "Roses All Around" relentlessly toward the track's vision of rain-filled gutters overflowing with dashed dreams, to the chiming sorrow and yearning of the steadily pounding "Inverness" where we find a strung out young man sitting in a wheelchair somewhere in downtown Portland accepting what fate has brought him, to "Crimey"'s darkly joyous dance groove and the one-two swan-song punch of apocalyptic dreamscape "Oil Burner" and the mournful, elegiac "I Needed the Pain," you'll find the honesty so hard fought for and won through the crucible of Savior paying further dividends on Dead Kids, R.I.P. City. Featuring guest vocals by Choir Boy's Adam Klopp on "Matty Rue" and Tamaryn on "Floodgate"

Get the album here.

Photo Credit: Sam Gehrke Photography