Album Review: Surrender - 'Waste & Wisdom'

9 December 2014 | 4:18 pm | Alex Sievers
Originally Appeared In

Here’s your new favourite band, no need to thank us.

Perth seems to get the short end of the proverbial stick when it comes to bands and tours. There’s no Perth date for Soundwave 2015, and most tours - both national and international acts - don’t travel out there a lot of the time, and some bands high tail it to other cities for bigger scenes and audiences. Surrender were, up until recently, based in Perth until they made the ol’ switcheroo to Melbourne. Now they’re in a relatively strategic position to take the nation on with an emotional storm of raw, passionate melodic hardcore this side of a teenager's Tumblr page.

The group's debut album, 2011’s ‘One Day’, was a criminally underrated master class of just how good Australian music can be when done right. Fast-forward three years and with just seven tracks; ‘Waste and Wisdom’ gives some of the scene's favourites a real marathon run for their money (or lack thereof, cause come on, let’s be real here). This new release, which has been LONG overdue, never overstays its welcome and has a stronger emphasis on its choruses, its song structures, and shows a significant step up with the band's songwriting overall.

Case in point is the album’s, and subsequently the band's best song, ‘Dark Wings, Dark Words’, a seemingly grim, realistic, and rather uplifting tale of mental illness (it also has a brilliant music video that you should totally check out right now). It’s not just the song’s lyrics that hit hard like a freight train, but the instrumentation swings pretty hard too, and it’s those powerful choruses that chillingly accent the strength and passion in this song. That’s something the band did really well on their debut album and now they’ve made lightning strike twice with not just ‘Dark Wings, ‘Dark Words’, but with the whole of ‘Waste & Wisdom’.

Their overall sound is characterised by punk and hardcore, (no real surprise there being on this site and what not) but it’s still melodic, still raw, and still better than most other bands in the local scenes. But perhaps, a better description of the sound is if you combined the instrumentation of angst-ridden and energetic pop-punk bands that seem to make up more bandwidth than porn websites and then throw some screams over it. ‘Fodder’, ‘Toxic’, and most recent single, ‘Conscious’, are the best examples of this kind of sound. So yes, comparisons to bands like Worthwhile and Trophy Eyes are definitely going to come up, but for their worth, Surrender do it far better than their more popular peers.

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As most of you should already know, Australia has a fantastic thriving alternative and heavy music scene and with the glorious tool that is the Internet, you need to go look up the boys in Surrender ASAP. Their new album is one of the best releases out of Melbourne this year. So off you go dear reader, it’s about time you find your new favourite band.

1. Toxic

2. Conscious

3. Fodder

4. Dark Wings, Dark Words

5. Climbers

6. Boneshaker

7. Dreamchaser