Where can I run to
For peace of heart and mind
How can I hide from
Your obsessions and delusions
It is a wasting that comes not in sudden violence but in slow and secret seepage, like water drawn from a stone until nothing remains but dust. Love, so named, becomes a trickster: first gentle, then ravenous, feeding upon the marrow of one’s days. Its promises rot in the throat; its touch chills more than it warms. What was once the music of closeness turns to a dirge, repeating until the soul itself grows weary of hearing. In that exhaustion lies a terrible nakedness, a knowing that all tenderness has been emptied, leaving only the raw silence of what is lost.
With this bleak heartache in mind, Scale to Weigh All Tears is the centerpiece of New Miserable Experience‘s latest LP, Absent Lovers. This Philadelphia band writes songs that sound pulled from the marrow: fragile, furious, and strangely cinematic. Born from file-traded fragments between David Grossman of Rosetta and Joshua Mahesh Kost of Model Prisoner, the project quickly grew legs. Bruce McMurtrie, also of Rosetta, added his weight, Brett Bamberger arrived from Revocation, and later Brody Uttley of Rivers of Nihil gave the group its final form. Together they built a language that mixes synth’s icy precision with the heartache of post-punk and the sprawl of shoegaze.
The song’s guitars glow with a surging intensity that recalls Elemental-era Tears For Fears: storm-lit, bruised, but unflinching. Synth textures rise and fall like weather fronts, while the vocals push against exhaustion, voicing the emptiness of a love turned corrosive. Repetition becomes a weapon, hammering the theme of depletion: devotion can hollow you out until nothing remains but the echo.
The accompanying video, shot by Scott Kinkade and edited by McMurtrie, drifts between vast landscapes and glitch-scarred performance footage. The result is both grounded and hallucinatory, a reminder that escape is possible…but rarely clean.
Watch the video for Scale to Weigh All Tears below:
Their debut EP, Philosophy on Pessimism, set the stage with scraps of despair turned into melody. With their first full-length, Absent Lovers, the band sharpen the attack, but also broaden their palette. Acoustic guitars cut through washes of synth, while vocals search for an exit from obsession and collapse. There is always the tension of scale: music that feels intimate and personal, yet widescreen in scope.
Earlier this year, New Miserable Experience announced their signing to Germany’s Pelagic Records, a label known for giving shape to music that thrives beyond boundaries. For a band intent on finding strength in misery, it’s a fitting home.
Listen to Scale To Weigh All Tears below and order Absent Lovers from Translation Loss Records here.
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