Photo: Anthony Purcella
Southern California band Movements — Patrick Miranda, vocals; Ira George, guitar; Spencer York, drums; and Austin Cressey, bass — dropped their new album RUCKUS! today, August 18, via Fearless Records. Get the album, produced by Will Yip, here.
Movements have mastered the art of push and pull dissonance throughout the course of their career and that signature style is patently evident on I Hope You Choke!. Tinny, tense guitar work, alternately sung and talked lyrics, and a gang chant of “I hope you choke” perfectly capture sonic storm-and-stress, the tension-and-release style that fans know and love.
It’s been a whirlwind few years for Movements as evidenced by the fact that band’s 2020 album No Good Left to Give debuted at #3 on the Alternative chart and their streams have doubled since then with 200 million total streams in the U.S. alone. However, despite their success, the Southern Californian act have constantly reinvented themselves since forming in 2015 and the band’s third full-length RUCKUS! sees the post-hardcore quartet taking their sound to expansive and sometimes unexpected places. Produced by longtime collaborator Will Yip (Circa Survive, Code Orange), the album fuses post-hardcore and punk influences with a healthy dose of pop songcraft to create an album that defies scene conventions in favour of something wholly unique. In order to accomplish this, the band made three extended trips to Yip‘s Studio 4 in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, to write and record the collection of songs that would end up as RUCKUS!.
“I truly don’t believe that it could have been a more streamlined process and I don’t think we’ve ever written music that’s as good as what we put together for this record,” Miranda explains. RUCKUS! sees the band integrating decidedly different influences such as Gorillaz and Strokes into their sound to challenge people’s preconceptions.