Sorority Noise’s 2015 album “Joy, Departed” culminated in an awakening. On “Using,” songwriter Cameron Boucher saves the album’s biggest, grungiest riff for an explosive declaration: “I stopped wishing I was dead!” The sentiment is played mostly for celebration, and Boucher shouts it with palpable joy. But it’s also a correction, an indictment of emo’s long history of glorifying depressive thinking, and an implied apology for his complicity in that. In interviews, Boucher explained “Using” was the first song he’d ever written with a positive takeaway. Despite his struggles with mental illness, he’d decided to make the best of things. “I started loving again,” he sang.
How cruel it is, then, that just as Boucher was learning to appreciate his own life, so many of the people close to him were giving up on theirs. Since recording Joy, Departed, Boucher lost some friends to suicide , Loss on that scale would upend anybody, but it’s especially derailing for an artist who’s had reason to fear he could meet the same fate. In all likelihood he’ll be working through his grief for albums to come, and that long process begins on the home-recorded It Kindly Stopped For Me EP, a four-song cycle narrated from the perspectives of both the departed and those left behind.
Boucher doesn’t just sound bereaved; he sounds downright shell-shocked. Singing like all the color has been drained from his face, he recites most of the EP in a sickly, half-inaudible mumble. If there are listeners who haven’t checked in on Sorority Noise since their debut LP Forgettable, released only two years ago, they won’t even recognize the band. Boucher’s purged every trace of pop-punk whimsy from his songs, trading crunchy riffs and shout-along tantrums for hushed pianos and closed-mic’ed drums tapped so lightly it’s as if they’re being gently blown on.
It Kindly Stopped is as intensely somber as its subject matter demands—maybe even more so, if that’s possible—and Boucher often seems to be processing these tragedies in real time. He captured the EP’s most disquieting track, the spoken-word interlude “Fource,” while he was literally wandering through the wilderness. “I think it might be okay, I’ll be okay,” Boucher mutters unconvincingly into his recorder while trying to catch his breath. “Today was an off day; I’ve had a few.” If he wasn’t actually drunk when he recorded it, he’s a mighty convincing actor. And while the rest of the EP is more deliberate than that field recording, it’s nearly as lonesome.
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Sonics aside, what truly distinguishes this recent iteration of Sorority Noise is Boucher’s newfound sense of responsibility. In concert, he prefaces “Using” with a heartfelt introduction about mental illness and the value of life. He includes a similar plea in It Kindly Stopped For Me’s liner notes. “If you do have the opportunity to listen to this record please know that suicide is not the answer,” he writes. “Please know how important you are and how much your life matters to your family, friends, and most importantly yourself.” Yet despite his convictions, he never admonishes the dead in these songs. He sympathizes with them too much for that. On “Either Way,” he casts life as a coin toss, drawing a parallel between a friend who saw “a chance to leave a life you couldn’t lead” and his own chance “to rid myself of my toxic ways,” a chance he could have just as easily missed. That’s the lone consolation on an otherwise disheartening EP, and it’s not an insignificant one: Many of his friends are gone, but Boucher is still here and he’s still thankful for that.
