Free from Concern comes staggering out of Hollywood with an abrasive, deathrock-tinged strain of post-punk and the understanding that a bad habit starts looking like a soulmate when it’s the only thing reliably taking your calls. Since forming in 2022 around vocalist Joshua Byler and guitarist Jorge Santacruz, the group have treated the town’s punk lineage less as a family tree than a convenient place to start an argument. Anxious Existence, out today, finds that argument turning inward, where disgust with contemporary life begins making strange alliances with whatever gets a person through another day.
The song’s bass and drums establish a bleak, repetitive momentum while the guitars scrape across the arrangement with enough abrasion to suggest somebody has been sharpening them against concrete. Byler sings with the detached hostility of a man who has already heard every comforting explanation available and found most of them ridiculous. His droning delivery hangs heavily over the track, giving the words the quality of thoughts repeated so often that they have become permanent fixtures in the skull.
There are recognizable coordinates here: the severe economy of Institute, Ceremony’s willingness to strip punk down to raw nerve and repetition, and some of Protomartyr’s sour-eyed observation. Free from Concern have also spent enough time in actual rooms with aggressive bands to understand that posture alone will get you nowhere. Their recent bills have included Spiritual Cramp and NIIS, encounters that make sense when hearing how naturally this group balances post-punk restraint with the threat of hardcore violence.
The subject of Anxious Existence is dependence, though Free from Concern approaches it from an angle far less tidy than the usual sermon about self-destruction.
“It’s a romanticization of the relationships we develop with our coping mechanisms.,” says the band.
That idea runs through the track like an infection. Coping mechanisms become companions, private religions, bad lovers, reliable enemies; eventually the distinction between relief and imprisonment gets difficult to locate. Byler sounds aware of the bargain and unwilling to pretend that awareness automatically provides an exit. The guitars keep grinding forward, the rhythm section maintains its cold discipline, and Byler sounds increasingly settled into his disgust.
Listen to Anxious Existence below and order the single here.
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