Black Box Recovery opens their six-song EP with a line that doubles as a thesis: “Divine belief in thievery your Eden obligates.” It’s dense, deliberately so, and it tells you immediately what kind of record Better Angels is going to be. This is post-hardcore built for people who want the genre to do more than make noise. The Portland, Maine-based quintet, recorded, produced, mixed, and mastered by Jay Maas at Getaway Recording in Haverhill, have written an EP that treats weaponized belief, spectacle politics, and willful ignorance as a single interconnected problem and then spends twenty-six minutes hitting it from every angle.
The six tracks of this EP build on each other deliberately, the argument sharpening with each song rather than resetting. Each track is a different face of the same argument. “Better Angels” establishes the framework: the hollow throne, the indoctrination suite, the “DO NOT INVESTIGATE” command that sardonically tells the listener not to ask questions. Guitarists Adam Kinney and Nate Atienza build the kind of riff architecture that rewards the density of the writing, giving vocalists Dylan Burrows and Kinney room to trade between melody and aggression without losing the thread. Turner Kelsey’s bass and Blaine Sawyer’s drums hold the whole thing in place with a precision that keeps the heavier passages from collapsing into noise. The switch-up around the 1-minute mark perfectly leaves you untethered from the more melodic moment that led into it and smashed up against a wall in the best way.
“Time & Interest” lulls you into a sense of safety in the first :20 seconds, before ripping the carpet out from under you with a blood curdling scream and double-bass drum combo that dares you to try not to bang your head along to it. The lyrics sharpen the political edge; its central image of ivory tower residents who have no time for anything until the streets start filling is doing a lot of work efficiently. The chorus pivot on “cheers to your time and interest, willing, living above it all” lands as genuine sarcasm rather than performance, which is the difference between political music that convinces and political music that preaches. The track has the early 2000s post-hardcore DNA that the band wears openly, with Glassjaw and Letlive as reasonable reference points, filtered through a more contemporary melodic sensibility.
“Fever Dreams” is the EP’s most ambitious track at four and a half minutes, building a fever-vision mythology around a bargained tome and a ragged shrine before opening into one of the record’s most memorable hooks: “So take your white rabbit and run / further to your burning temple / taking all and leaving none.” The imagery is strange and specific in ways that earn the listener’s attention, the “fey, telluric choir” and “diamond spires” building a world that feels genuinely surreal rather than generically dark. The closing invocation, “Kingdom. Power. Glory. Threefold.”, lands with the weight of something ritualistic, which is exactly the point.
“New Saints” turns the lens toward gentrification and cultural displacement, the sharks flooding in to claim famous ghosts and paint them gold while the people who built those streets are priced out and pushed aside. “Defile, hostile architect / and mark it red to market them / artificial art, official theft” is three lines of tightly compressed fury. “Rose-Colored Glasses” feels almost like it would fit on My Chemical Romance’s I Brought You My Bullets album. By the time you hit the 2:20 breakdown, you’re on a macabre ride that you don’t want to exit, and luckily, there’s still nearly 3 minutes of run-time to go. For the album narrative, the track widens the scope again, its central metaphor of a narrow lens as the perfect drug sustaining itself across five minutes of dynamic escalation, the chamber imagery giving the song a claustrophobic quality that suits the subject.
Closer “The Divine Thief” runs six minutes and earns the runtime by functioning as a summation rather than a repetition. “When you say believe in me / I know what you mean / you don’t believe in anything” is the EP’s clearest statement of theme, and the closing pivot back to “I believe it’s thievery” closes the loop the opening track opened. Six songs, one argument, no filler. Better Angels knows exactly what it wants to say and builds everything around saying it as forcefully as possible.
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