An article in Vice hailed “Cardinal” as “a perfect album.” The band was selling out midsize clubs nationwide, playing shows that were starting to feel vaguely religious. Pinegrove’s breakthrough album, “Cardinal,” released in 2016, contained “Visiting” and seven more songs that were similarly plaintive, and similarly addictive.īy the time Hall played that festival in Michigan, the Pinegrove cult was growing both more obsessive and less exclusive. The band graduated from basements to clubs and got a contract with an independent record label, called Run for Cover. After a few years, Hall noticed that audiences were singing along. Pinegrove built a following in basements-first in Hall’s home town of Montclair, New Jersey, and then farther afield. The spirit of emo was instead nurtured online and at do-it-yourself house shows, where the financial stakes were low. But by the twenty-tens, when Pinegrove emerged, there was no sense in worrying about who would be the next Fall Out Boy with hip-hop ascendant and MTV essentially dead, it seemed clear that there wouldn’t be one. In the two-thousands, “emo” often denoted angsty and theatrical hard-rock bands like Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance, which briefly dominated MTV and the nation’s high schools. This music fits, loosely, into the category of emo, which began, in the nineteen-eighties, as a passionate offshoot of hardcore punk, and expanded to include a universe of bands that were simultaneously scrappy and sentimental. And yet Pinegrove harnesses, perhaps more effectively than any other band of its era, the power of a well-turned musical confession. Pinegrove turns lyrics such as these into rousing and sometimes twangy rock songs, which fail to be cool in two different ways: they are equally as likely to elicit cringes from listeners who value emotional restraint as they are from those who demand fashionable innovation. Then he led his band through “Visiting,” which seems to chronicle a long-distance entanglement (“I’m spectral for days on end, these days / With thoughts about visiting”), and which drives toward a fervent expression of confusion:īut the truth is I don’t know what I thought I knew it. “Just trust me-I mean it,” Hall said, with a sheepish smile. There is something embarrassing about loving a band enough to give yourself a nickname, just as there is something embarrassing about singing earnest songs full of romantic complaints. Hall, who is thirty, is the singer and songwriter for Pinegrove, an indie-rock band that was then assembling an unusually zealous group of fans-Pinenuts, they sometimes called themselves, with self-deprecating sincerity. “Because the eyes are the best way to let a person know that you mean it.” He was joking, sort of. “I feel like it’s unfortunate that I have to wear sunglasses,” he said, lifting them to squint at the sun and at the crowd. On a hot Michigan afternoon in September, 2017, Evan Stephens Hall was onstage at a music festival, tuning his guitar and thinking about his sunglasses.
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