Boston hardcore act Defeater will release their fourth studio album, Abandoned, on August 28 on Epitaph. The band has released a video for a new song, “Spared in Hell“.
Unlike most bands—and especially most hardcore bands— Defeater don’t write songs so much as they write histories, and specifically the history of a never-named New Jersey family whose already troubled lives disintegrate into torment, rendered all the more tragic for the depth and detail of singer Derek Archambault’s lyrics. Abandoned is the most relentlessly raw and uncompromising chapter so far, powered by a renewed sense of artistic ambition and a plot twist no one expected.
Abandoned was written and recorded in a welcome period of relief in Archambault’s life, after he’d finally received a life-changing surgery that repaired severe hip damage he suffered in an injury. Archambault’s surgery, he says, allowed him to redouble his connection with his own writing, leaving him clear to truly inhabit what he calls his own Glass family—after the famous J.D. Salinger characters. The new album chronicles the story of a lapsed Catholic priest, whose battles in Europe during the war drag him first toward faith and then his own poisonous faithlessness.
Archambault states:
“One of the threads running through this record is how people sometimes look for the answers to their problems in the darkest places.”
ABANDONED TRACK LIST
1. Contrition
2. Unanswered
3. December 1943
4. Spared In Hell
5. Divination
6. Borrowed & Blue
7. Penance
8. Remorse
9. Pillar Of Salt
10. Atonement
11. Vice & Regret
DEFEATER US TOUR DATES
09-01 Grog Shop – Cleveland Heights, OH
09-02 Shelter – Detroit, MI
09-03 The Bottom Lounge – Chicago, IL
09-04 Triple Rock Social Club – Minneapolis, MN
09-05 The Firebird -St. Louis, MO
09-06 The Waiting Room – Omaha, NE
09-08 Marquis Theater – Denver, CO
09-09 The Complex – Salt Lake City, UT
09-11 The Crocodile – Seattle, WA
09-12 Hawthorne Theater- Portland, OR
09-14 The Boardwalk – Orangevale, CA
09-15 Epicentre – San Diego, CA
09-16 Chain Reaction – Anaheim, CA
09-17 Chain Reaction – Anaheim, CA
09-18 Club Red – Tempe, AZ
09-19 The Works – Albuquerque, NM
09-21 Gas Monkey – Dallas, TX
09-22 Red 7 – Austin, TX
09-23 Warehouse Live – Houston, TX
09-25 The Social – Orlando, FL
09-26 O’Malley’s – Margate, FL
09-27 Local 662 – St. Petersburg, FL
09-28 The Masquerade – Atlanta, GA
09-29 Exit/In – Nashville, TN
09-30 Headliners – Louisville, KY
10-01 The Altar Bar – Pittsburgh, PA
10-02 Rock & Roll Hotel – Washington, DC
10-03 Shakas Live – Virginia Beach, VA
10-04 Union Transfer – Philadelphia, PA
10-06 Gramercy Theater – New York, NY
10-07 The Chance Theatre – Poughkeepsie, NY
10-10 The Waiting Room – Buffalo, NY
10-11 The Middle East – Cambridge, MA