Static Dress

Static Dress is the award-winning UK based alternative group whose high-concept 2022 debut album Rouge Carpet Disaster revolved around a dynamic, noirish lore. Since their debut single ‘clean.’ was released in 2019, the band have released comic books (with accompanying soundtracks) and video games that centre around the album’s story and origins, littering a breadcrumb trail of clues for what is to come next in the process. Consideration is at the heart of the band’s process, forcing listeners to not only play the music, but engage with the vast array of multimedia opportunities to immerse themselves in the band’s art and overarching narrative.

Rouge Carpet Disaster has become recognised as one of contemporary post-hardcore’s most impactful records, earning them legions of fans globally, two arena tours with Bring Me The Horizon, a lengthy UK/EU and North American run with Underoath, slots at festivals such as Reading & Leeds, Sick New World, Outbreak Fest, Furnace Fest, and a main stage performance at Download in 2025.

With a somewhat rapid ascent to prominence, demand has been high for the follow up to their 2022 debut, which is slated arrive in the summer of 2026. The album, titled injury episode, charts the silent growing pains of the period since their debut was released using a continuation of Rouge Carpet Disaster‘s lore as a surreal allegory for trauma, loss, and what emerged as the reality behind a lifelong fantasy. Sonically as well as thematically, this is the most “human” Static Dress have sounded. The album is free from studio trickery and programming – hammering out complex emotions on record often in single takes to allow the intensity and exposed nerves of expression to truly shine through, as if the listener is in the room with them. The album acts as a comment on the commodification of art; how algorithms and a “constantly-scrolling” culture has veered mainstream audiences away from challenging art towards instant gratification. To combat this, the band will present a collection of tracks that are visceral in nature yet undeniably infectious in their own right, eschewing typical song structure to force the listener to decode them for maximum impact. The album also marks the first full length project that features musical contributions from each of the band’s members; Olli Appleyard (vocals), Vin Weight (Guitar), George Holding (Bass), and Sam Ogden (Drums). That collaborative effort is palpable in the recordings, with injury episode marking the most diverse collection of music that that band has ever created.

Sonically, injury episode takes the polar opposites of Static Dress’ sound to new extremes while feeling like the listener is in the room with the band as they hammer out these songs in real time. Tracks like ‘questioning’ place the band’s ability to write a world-beating hook on full display while retaining the venomous bite of their previous work, while ‘ …hospice’ is the first real example of Static Dress writing music that feels truly stadium-sized; a song to sing at the skyalongside thousands of like-minded individuals. Previous tourmates and friends Underoath join the band on the playfully named ‘Nostalgia Kills’; an explosive cut of post-hardcore that acts as a true passing of the torch moment, finding the scene legends re-engaging with a sound akin to 2006’s seminal Define The Great Line record and trading barbed words with Appleyard at the song’s climax. The album’s centrepiece comes in the form of ‘dull blade disguise’; a mid-tempo waltz punctuated by shards of distorted melody and an uncompromising composition, leading to a genuinely show-stopping crescendo. For a band who have come to be defined by their ambition, ‘dull blade disguise’ characterises that propensity to continue to push things forward in the name of emotional catharsis while providing one of many unconventional new anthems for a generation of people looking to escape an increasingly less hospitable world.

In essence, injury episode is one of global alternative music’s most mysterious and forward-thinking bands tearing down the veil and showing the world that in an era of homogenised studio sleight of hand, the most subversive thing you can do is present your truth in raw, unflinching and real fashion. There is, after all, nothing more imaginative and complex than undiluted human emotion.

The band’s vocalist and creative mastermind Olli Appleyard is a polymath in the truest sense. He has built a genuinely fantastical world around the band’s output across audio, visual and narrative building. When that world has become so enormous that it enveloped his own personal life, the natural evolution of that situation is to cross-pollinate his real-life experiences with the cinematic, foreboding world of Static Dress. injury episode is the result.

I Promised The World

I Promised The World are a band born out of the desire to thrive in the face of tragedy. The Texas-based five-piece started life after the father of vocalist/guitarist Caleb Molina lost his in 2020 due to COVID. Though the band—completed by vocalist Hunter Wilson, drummer Mason Zschau, guitarist Mason Nowlin and bassist Rivers Shutt—didn’t actually form until a few years later in 2023, their existence is intrinsically linked to his death. It goes without saying that I Promised The World has always been both an extension and expression of Molina’s grief. But, as the band’s  new self-titled EP demonstrates, it now also exists in defiance of it, as a celebration of Molina’s dad’s life.

“My dad was a musician who played every instrument,” says Molina. “He was the worship leader at church, so I’d go with him, be the first one there and help him set up. He was always up late making music, and that really inspired me. I wrote my first song probably three weeks after he passed, and I just feel like it’s something that he’s carried in. He’s my biggest inspiration and motivation for making music—and I think he wouldn’t believe it if he saw what we were doing right now.”

He’s right. In a couple of short years, I Promised The World—whose oldest member is just 21—have done and experienced an awful lot. Initially called Sinema, the band released a debut EP, After The Flatline, and album, Fear Of The Fall, in late 2023 and 2024 respectively. Their blend of screamo, Midwest emo and post-hardcore is an emotionally volatile tour de force—certainly not something you’d ever hear in a church—that takes inspiration both from the late ’90s/early 2000s but through a post-internet lens. It means that I Promised The World are able to authentically channel and pay tribute to disparate influences such as, say, Glassjaw and Mineral, even though its members were barely alive, if at all, when those bands first broke up. At the same time, it’s not just a carbon-copy tribute to that era—these songs are injected with I Promised The World’s unique attitude and sense of purpose.

That’s something that has seen them share stages with the likes of Deafheaven, Harm’s Way, February, Midrift and more. In May 2025, the band—whose members, unusually, have never all lived in the same town—announced that, due to circumstances beyond their control, they were going to henceforth be known as I Promised The World. At the same time, they were insistent that “nothing else will change besides our name.”

While that’s true, Molina does also admit that this new self-titled EP also represents a kind of restart and rebirth for the band. Initially, it was going to be called Sinema, something that would directly tie the band’s present (and future) to their past, but in the end decided to go with the eponymous title to highlight everything that’s changed for the band since they started writing these five songs. “It was a big transitional period for us,” says Molina. “Not only in terms of the name, but also the tours we’re doing, and how much busier we got. We still have the DIY ethos, but we went from playing basement shows and local shows every weekend to being on tour where that wasn’t possible to do. But things feel really good right now, and I’m very glad to have accomplished my goals. I feel like I’ve proved myself to myself.”

Recorded at Timber Studios in Bayonne, NJ with Jon Markson and Adam Cichocki, I Promised The World begins tentatively, quietly, somberly, with the atmospheric intro of opener “Proud” before that song then erupts properly so that blend of screamo, Midwest emo and post-hardcore hybrid is suddenly flowing in full, unstoppable force, like blood through—or maybe even out of—veins. Throughout the EP, Molina’s yearning, broken vocals and Wilson’s dark, guttural growls swirl in and out of each other. “Proud” is followed by the otherworldly swell of “A Pure Expression” before the simultaneously aggressive yet vulnerable surge of “Bliss In 7 Languages”. Then there’s the shapeshifting “Future Worth Dying For” which reinvents itself each time you think you know where it’s going, before “Emerald Waltz” closes things out, as it evolves from the quiet, pained desperation of its beginnings into a constant, cacophonous crescendo that’s both beautiful and foreboding at the same time.

As they’ve always done, Molina and Wilson collaborated on the lyrics for each of these songs, which only serves to double down on the intensity of the emotions they contain and exude. Inspired by an epiphany that they had leading up to the making of this EP, on all five songs there’s a palpable sense of I Promised The World taking control of their lives—both as a band and as people—and of being intentional about everything they do.
“We’re all getting to that age where we’re trying to fully transfer to adult life,” says Molina. “Writing this EP, we realized that if we want to succeed in our band and in life, we have to give it our all. We realized this could be something if we didn’t fuck around. It was also around the time Hunter became straight edge. I still partake in a little bit of drinking and stuff, but me and him used to literally smoke weed every day, and it was getting in the way of doing what we wanted to do. We just wanted to be fully present at every moment, take full control and reach our full potential. We wanted to make our future a reality.”

I Promised The World, then, is a powerful artistic manifestation of their decision to do exactly that. It’s symbolic of both the old iteration of the band and the new one, because even though nothing has changed, everything has changed. This is a new beginning, of sorts, that details I Promised The World’s dreams. As Molina puts it, it’s about “being hopeful and not giving up and following your ambitions.” In other words, it’s the sound of the band shedding the skin of who they were in order to fully become who they’ve always known themselves to be.
“That’s why I really wanted it to be self-titled,” says Molina. “Because this is us.”

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