Label: Equal Vision
Producer: Jon Markson
Release Year: 2026
Listen: Spotify / Apple Music
This was the hard stuff back in the day. The band that spanned hard rock and post-hardcore and everything that my typical indie rock slackers couldn’t get behind. There were no idiosyncrasies or quirkiness. Nope, it’s straight-ahead hard rock that made Helmet seem gleamy and pedestrian by comparison. Now, some 30 years on from their debut album, Slip, they still kind of feel the same. But brought into the slickness of post-hardcore’s producer du jour, Jon Markson. A man with whom I have a fundamental disagreement on how music should sound. Because this is just cranking shit up to eleven and pushing the sound out into your headphones in an earthshaking attack.
There is a thing that I understand is called melodic hardcore. I’m not sure what the “melodic” is supposed to indicate. I mean, I imagine it means there is some sort of melody, as opposed to the blistering pummeling and screaming that typically adorns (or doesn’t adorn) most true hardcore music. And, sure, this Quicksand album has some of that. “That” being discernible musical notes. But is there melody? I mean, not really. Shit tons of drumming circling your head. And echoey voice and wall-of-sound chugging. At least for the most part. Even the guitar solos — if you can call them that — are just kind of some simple octaves and scales. Though you feel like perhaps they’ll break into some Tool melodic something at some juncture, but it just really never happens. It’s all head-banging all the time.
Until they get “sensitive” on songs like “Supercollidar,” where their alt-metal downshifts momentarily into a chorus where you can actually hear individual guitar notes. But just barely. Otherwise, it’s chug chug chug and vocal tones that push up against each other to make everything kind of hit the same note — or at least the same tone. To this end, I do have a little trouble telling one song from another. Because the recording and filters put on Walter Schreifels’ voice and the musical dynamics just all kind of hit that same pitch and occupy the same space on every song, turning it into one long song.
Then you hit “Days You Run To,” the first attempt to not be that one song. It definitely feels like some sort of overproduced version of a mid-nineties tune that I can’t quite put my finger on. Like a semi-hippie Smashing Pumpkins track off Adore that a post-hardcore producer just wasn’t sure what to do with. It’s weird. Which is followed up by “Cool Guy,” which sounds a little bit like what Suno or Udio might come up with if you told it to write you a “nice” post-hardcore tune. This song in particular gives me the same uncanny feeling LinkedIn posts written by ChatGPT give me. Like there is no human in the loop. The album finishes off okay, but that one almost broke me. All in all, I think it feels exactly like what it is: a melding of 90s metalcore and the 2020s version of the kids’ post-hardcore. It’s entertaining in parts, and not terrible, but there are way better versions of this out there in 2026, created by a bunch of youngsters who weren’t even born when Quicksand became a thing.
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