Calm & Secure push the situational irony with their hectic and grinding emoviolence debut album Glass In The Mouth Of The Sun.
Release date: January 9, 2026 | Wax Vessel | Bandcamp
The early to mid 2000s were an interesting time for pop culture. Nu metal was about to bite the dust, you couldn’t swing a pair of Converse without hitting some douche with frosted tips, and anything that was vaguely shouty and emotional was labeled as, emo, or worse screamo. I’m not afraid to admit that I fall in the latter camp. Oh, the folly of youth!
In recent years, the screamo (re?)revival, more popularly known as skramz since 2015ish, started to evolve and in its current state includes more blackened, atmospheric, and chaotic mathy elements. More often than not, I’ve found myself delving into the gritty, frazzled, sweaty realm of skramz and its cousin/sort-of-inside-joke-turned-genre, emoviolence.
Which leads me to introducing Calm & Secure, an emoviolence supergroup, composed of From A Second Story Window’s Sean Vandegrift (vocals) and The Heartland’s Johnathan Thompson (guitar). Some may be more familiar with those two bands than me going into checking out their debut album, Glass In The Mouth Of The Sun, but that likely won’t prepare you for quite how anguish-driven and wild the material is.
While The Heartland dosed out mathgrind ridiculousness interspersed with breakdowns and From A Second Story Window had strong progressive metalcore tendencies, Calm & Secure is another beast altogether. One that harnesses attributes from both bands but ultimately, for me, is stronger, with Glass In The Mouth Of The Sun making a forceful, emotive impact through deranged drum work, acrid vocals, and punishing guitars. There’s a lot of that early MySpace-era, over-the-top grind influence and scuzzy screamo vibe going on, and while I’m not always down with that feeling, when it hits, it hits…and, oh boy does Calm & Secure hit.
Savage and unhinged to the point of despair, Calm & Secure does the latter part of the ‘emoviolence’ descriptor proud. Glass In The Mouth Of The Sun, upon first listen, takes you to a bizarre and dark world where you are constantly free-falling, thorns tearing at your clothes and the howling of the wind in your ears as you descend, filling you both with dread and a tangible excitement. Every track, save the two ambient tracks, are an assault on your senses and an attempt to get you to loose cohesion and start attacking the walls with your fists.
Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t admit that their balls-to-the-axe-grinder approach didn’t verge on sensory overload at times. Not in the way of a too-much-going-on-at-once, math-y sense, but more due to the choice band has made to stick with unpalatable, grimy production and a decision to make all the instrumentation blown. It’s almost headache inducing; maddening to the point where, at times, especially on tracks like “Without Light”, I felt like my eardrums were being attacked. It’s unapologetically unpolished, daring you to turn the volume down and save yourself – and I say this as someone who thinks this album is great.
For all the chaos on display, Calm & Secure are thoroughly intentional. The swirling, ambient build up of “Sleep Paralysis” into the peaking breakdowns and scatty drums on “Rooms That Never Stop Sinking”, or the grinding jazziness of “Corpse With My Face” that then switches again to the soothing “Liminal Static”: Calm & Secure know their way around punching you in the face and then offering a tissue to stem your nose bleed. If not for those respites from the aural abuse, then we might be looking at an overtly different situation.
It would be fair to say that Calm & Secure’s debut isn’t going to be for everyone. It’s a very short, just over 13-minute, ordeal of nail-on-chalkboard screamed vocals set to floorpunching beatdown riffs and blasts of grind, all being played out of blown-out speakers. I love it, but can definitely recognise that this will grate on some due to the band’s harsh lo-fi and cutting artistic choices. This is the sort of music that treads the fine line between being over-the-top confrontational and bearing its soul for the sake of artistic expression.
