Bow & Spear — Everything Melts
Released July 27, 2025
From Chicago, Illinois
In a haze of distortion and feeling, Bow & Spear return with Everything Melts, an album that doesn’t just live in the tension between grunge and shoegaze — it breathes it. Hailing from Chicago’s underground, the band crafts a sound that feels both elemental and eroded, like rusted steel buried beneath snow. It's not clean or polished, and that’s precisely the point. This is music that fractures, bleeds, and builds again.
Self-engineered and recorded entirely by the band, Everything Melts is a testament to creative control and sonic trust. John Bergman’s drums roll like thunderclouds; Dan Palella’s bass locks into the ground like rebar; David Ritter's vocals ride waves of noise with equal parts ache and defiance; Tyler Ryssemus’s guitar work adds a constant push-and-pull between clarity and collapse. Stephen Holliger also lends a low-end pulse on the crushing “Participation Trophy.”
What sets this album apart isn’t just its genre fusion, but its emotional geography — wide, bleak, and strangely warm. There’s a weight to the record that mirrors its title. You feel everything dissolving: memories, identity, time itself. The guitars aren’t just loud — they drip with corrosion. The melodies don’t just soar — they drag their feet through the mud. And yet, the moments of beauty are undeniable: flashes of hope caught between the static.
In Everything Melts, Bow & Spear have bottled a feeling: the slow, strange collapse of something once solid. It’s not apocalyptic, but personal. This is music for the hours when the world turns soft at the edges — when you look back at who you were, unsure whether to mourn or smile.
Grunge and shoegaze rarely marry this well. But here, the union feels natural — like heavy clouds just before the break in the sky.
© Thusblog
