Griefeater – Worn

With Worn, Griefeater deliver one of the most strikingly visceral shoegaze statements to come out of Chicago’s underground in recent years. True to their name, the band channels heaviness — not in volume alone, but in emotional weight. This is shoegaze built on grit, exhaustion, tenderness, and the unsettling beauty of collapse.

Chicago’s loudest heartbreak

Chicago has always nurtured darker, denser variations of alternative music, and Griefeater tap directly into that lineage. Worn sounds like a city night soaked in rain, headlights diffused into blurred halos through a cracked windshield. Their guitars don’t shimmer — they crush.
Yet underneath the distortion lies an unmistakable melodic core, fragile and persistent, like a voice trying to rise above the noise.

Everything on the album feels pushed to its limit:

• walls of blown-out guitar fuzz,

• vocals buried and ghostlike,

• bass that rumbles as if from deep underground,

• drums that hit like collapsing beams.

It’s shoegaze at its most physical — tactile, overwhelming — but never chaotic. Griefeater sculpt their noise with intention.

A portrait of exhaustion turned into sound

The title Worn fits perfectly.
The album moves like a slow emotional unraveling, each track capturing a different shade of weariness:

• the numbness that settles after heartbreak,

• the heaviness that builds from carrying sorrow too long,

• the quiet realization that you’ve reached your limit.

Instead of dramatizing these emotions, Griefeater turn them into texture.
The distortion fractures at the edges.
The vocals feel strained, distant, dissolving.
The rhythms sag and sway as if pulled down by invisible weight.

It’s an album that understands fatigue not as defeat, but as a liminal state — one where truth floats to the surface.

Shoegaze that feels lived-in, bruised, and real

Where many modern shoegaze bands chase perfection or dreamy elegance, Griefeater embrace imperfections — the rough surfaces, the cracks in the sound, the emotional static.
This gives Worn a rare authenticity.
It sounds like people in a room, pushing themselves, letting go, and leaving everything on tape.

Chicago’s shoegaze scene has quietly grown into one of the most compelling in the US, and Worn positions Griefeater firmly at its core — a band unafraid to be loud, unafraid to be vulnerable, unafraid to bleed through their music.

A powerful, cathartic release

With Worn, Griefeater offer more than noise and melody — they offer catharsis.
It’s the kind of album you don’t just listen to; you absorb it, let it press against your chest, let it shake something loose inside you.

Shoegaze this raw, this emotional, and this sonically massive doesn’t appear often.

Griefeater’s Worn is one of those rare moments.

© Thusblog