My Fictions
Stranger Songs

The chaos stagnates around us. The roaring and convulsive metropolitan world envelops and crushes us.

The My Fictions are a band from Massachusetts, USA. Their hardcore music is penetrating and dramatic, focused on the emotions that the violence of their songs emanates. Their debut "Stranger Songs" (on Topshelf Records) is a bomb divided into ten tracks. An explosion lasting twenty-eight minutes.

The start is toxic and smoky. "Mt. Misery" immediately makes it clear that My Fictions aren't kidding. Guitars, bass, and drums sweep everything away, dragging us into the vortex of an endless black hole. Because when you’re feeling low, you’ll do anything to feel less alone. Frenetic and very fast, "Postcards" is one of the best tracks. Sick and destructive sounds wrapped in a destabilizing and exciting melody. Far from novices and inexperienced youngsters, My Fictions immediately fire their best shot, showcasing all their skill. It just blooms and bursts, it just blooms and burns – nothing stays, and it hurts.

The four guys from Merrimack Valley, on the border between Massachusetts and New Hampshire, definitely know what they're doing and they demonstrate it right away in this debut album where the splendid, dark melody perfectly matches the dark and very personal lyrics. As in "Lower (A Selfish Song)" where the screams grow desperate and the music is a dense fog, as impenetrable and heavy as a boulder. I lost sight. I pay the price. I’m a dying dog on his way to the shed. Staring into the sky, don’t give a fuck what’s next. I don’t care. I can’t see it.

Written and recorded over the past year, My Fictions' debut album already sounds like a small great classic of the screamo scene: reminiscences of Converge, American Nightmare, and the more recent Loma Prieta and Birds In Row give the album the right push to climb high on the list of the best hardcore releases this year. Nothing is excessive, nothing collides. The ten tracks intersect with each other without smudges, without signs of yielding. And if in the central track "Concern" you catch your breath for a couple of minutes, here comes the extreme urgency and the jaw-breaking melody of "Wake Anxious" which overwhelms and assaults. An anxious awakening, as the title suggests. An awakening that releases anger and pain, that vents and strikes us violently and bloodily.

The lesson of Converge is absorbed and inherited by My Fictions in the short and brutal "Stubborn", with lethal drumming that breaks vertebrae and leaves you breathless. Bitterness and apathy violently transpire in the amazing final track, "Stranger". A slow song that devours from the inside and leaves you powerless. Because I could never stay in this place, I’m too attached to leaving someday and looking back just to remember what it’s like to have something. A song about leaving the past behind, about the pain of turning the page and leaving the place you belong to face a new life, a new world.

The chaos stagnates around us. The roaring and convulsive metropolitan world envelops and crushes us. But with these shocking twenty-eight minutes of music, we can face the harsh reality feeling less alone, less lost. My Fictions paint with their debut album the canvas of today's youth in gray and rotten tones, oppressed and without any hope. "Stranger Songs" is a little gem that shines with black pitch and salty tears, yet it surprises unexpectedly and leaves you speechless. A precious stone born from magma and ash. A truly exciting debut.