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“C Song” splays ruptured, distorted chords in a buzzing intro, then clears the smoke for bare, earnest vocals. Miles Chandler, the singer, has a rough, yearning voice, that flourishes in the shadow of giant, irregular riffs and bashing, climatic drums. “I know it’s sick, but I can’t look,” he sings, amidst a ferocious, tuneful clangor, ringing through like Emil Amos of Holy Sons or even Doug Martsch from Built to Spill.

The band came together in the last part of the 2010s and released its debut full-length, Projections of a Body Electric in 2020, then as now hugging the noisier, more guitar driven end of the slowcore continuum and sweetening it with folk and country touches. A succession of Eps and single releases ensued—Surface Tension in 2023, Clifford Presents: White Hat, Slowbird, Fist Fight and Sugar Pill in early 2025—and now, this second long-player. In addition to Chandler, the band includes Ben Currell on drums, Danny Edlin on piano and guitar and Nate Scaringi on bass.

The New England vibe is especially strong on “Ink Blot” the track that sounds the most like Ovlov, with its keening vocals and pulsing, propulsive underpinnings. It dreams and drifts like that W. Mass band; it churns the seismic guitar ruptures in the breaks between choruses. “Gifthorse” is slower and more ruminative, giving Chandler’s creaky tenor sway over billowing swells of guitar and bass. There’s a harder, more abrasive song in the wings here. You can hear the bass arguing for it in the chug chug chug that kicks off an instrumental bridge. But it’s the combination of glistening, slow-rocking beauty and immanent explosion that gives the cut its tension.  

The title track is pretty glorious, its tootling fairground intro giving away to blistering chords. The melody shuffles forward, in no particular hurry, amid firestorms of rock energy and country-ish flares of pedal steel (that’s guest player Zack Wiggs). It seems like there used to be more bands in the basic Clifford mold, finding threads of beauty in a clashing, bashing rock-into-roots onslaught, but even in the 1990s heyday, this would have been one of the good ones. 

Krill came out of a math-y, complicated, guitar-driven punk-pop scene that centered around bands like Pile and Speedy Ortiz and the Exploding in Sound label (which released the band’s final album, A Distant Fist Unclenching, in 2015). A trio, comprised of Jonah Furman, Aaron Ratoff and Ian Becker, the band turned pop punk inside out, blasting massive salvos of guitar, bass, drum sounds through complicated song structures and over yelping, self-lacerating lyrics of surprising tunefulness. Brute force met over-engineered complexity in their songs, but there was nothing off-putting about it. Furman’s wavery, electro-shocked singing embedded a vulnerable core into the most baroque concoctions. Even vamping, as in the “why, yay, yay yays” of “Piranha Girl,” he sounds like he’s feeling something rather than performing it. The intensity is absolutely real.

Krill songs often tip on the fulcrum between self-aggrandizement and self-hatred, never more so than in “Solitaire,” the album’s stand-out cut. The song concerns busted love and the way it gets translated into art; it is both about heartbreak and about how pointless it is to write songs about heartbreak. It proceeds from trying to find meaning in a maybe meaningless connection, to attempting to miss what was never very important to flailing away at the whole mess to try to turn it into art. The song ends with a swipe at itself, “But this three minutes/Well these are just a distraction/Just a momentary lapse in form/Dumb garage rock for some stupid girl I don't miss/A face floating in nothingness.”

Musically, these songs are likewise complicated, often starting with a throbbing, block simple line of bass and singing, then erupting in howl of rock noise, then cutting it all back to nothing again. Cuts are made of disparate pieces, loud ones, soft ones, hooky ones, obliterating ones, all working at cross purposes, yet somehow fitting together. It was a band entirely aware of its own neuroses, yet also brashly confident in itself, a band that wrote a song called “Self-Hate Will be the Death of Youth Culture,” and meant it, sort of.

Krill broke up in 2015 and reformed, more or less, as a band called Knot in 2020. This reissue celebrates the original release’s ten-year anniversary and offers an LP of this music for the first time. Krill may not have lasted forever, as its theme promised, but its music left—and continues to leave—a mark.