The Best Songs of 2023 with Jeremy Bolm of Touché Amoré

For this final conversation of 2023, Jeremy Bolm and I each pick our three favorite songs of the year and discuss them—with whatever else comes up in the process.

Jeremy Bolm, live with Touché Amoré at California is for Lovers Fest. August 26, 2023. Photo by Oscar Rodriguez.

While it’s certainly true that I place a personal focus on hardcore as a community, that doesn’t mean the music doesn’t matter, and in 2023, the music really took us to some incredible places. For my final conversation of the year, I enlisted the help of Touché Amoré’s Jeremy Bolm to revisit some of those places, with each of us choosing and discussing three of our favorite songs of the year—the songs that moved us the most, for any reason.

In addition to his band, Jeremy is also host of The First Ever Podcast, one of the most avid record collectors I know, and the friend I’d reach out to first if I wanted to know more about almost any new band. He’s one of those rare artists who isn’t afraid to be seen as a fan first, which is to say I knew we were kindred spirits the second we met. There was, of course, an enormous amount of excellent new music to consider this year, and between the two of us, the six songs we chose represent a pretty wide range of styles and sentiment. There’s a lot we left out, without question, we know. But it was also interesting to see where the patterns emerged, when the similarities ended, and best of all, how six songs can still manage to tell a story about this year all on their own.

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Before we talk about our favorite songs, what was your top feeling of 2023?

JEREMY: Easy question! [laughs] Oh man, it’s been a hard year—especially being in this part of California where the entertainment industry is so thriving. My family is very involved in the entertainment industry, whether it’s my girlfriend, my dad, my brother. So obviously with the strike, it’s made it a very financially stressful year. It’s kind of hard for that to have not cast a shadow since summer, basically. Not to mention everything that’s happening abroad, which is devastating, and an election season that’s upon us that no one is thrilled about because everything is so depressing. But you know, through that, there have been some things that have been really nice [laughs]. At least there have been some things art-wise that have been a safe haven, or something you can rely on to just be there. What about you?

Well, sometimes when you’re in a year with such a casted shadow, whenever it feels like a little bit of light comes in, it’s very pronounced. So obviously, for me, that light has been Anti-Matter. Because this wasn’t even a thing in 2023. It wasn’t even a thing in May [laughs].

JEREMY: …And now it must be such a huge part of your day.

A huge part of my life, really. I don’t think people understand how much I’ve put into this. But I think the thing that’s been the “top feeling” of it isn’t even the response, which has been amazing and positive and great. It’s the feeling that I took a risk and that I believed in myself enough to take that risk. Because once I put myself out there, and once I made a yearly subscription available, I knew I would feel completely obligated to see that through—even if only four people bought one.

JEREMY: You have to appease those four people for a year! [laughs] I understand that feeling. I have a similar thing on Patreon, or even with having advertisers on my podcast. They’re expecting to get at least four ads on four episodes. I have to show up and make episodes happen. I have to do that.

I don’t know if you’re like me, but one of my biggest problems in life is that I am, more often than not, a cart-before-the-horse person. I get very excited about things. And then I start doing the work on them, and I might realize there’s a lot more work to this than I expect, and depending on the project, I might find myself retreating. I don’t know if you ever go through that.

Definitely. But I’m also someone who takes a long time to make decisions. So once I make a decision, I usually put myself in a position where I have to go down with the ship [laughs]. For better or worse. I would have to be truly suffering to pull out completely. But right now Anti-Matter is in a good place. Thursday is in a good place. Global scenarios notwithstanding, my personal and creative life has been pretty good this year, and that’s exciting.

JEREMY: It’s similar to what was happening in 2020 and 2021. Like, there’s a guilt that can sometimes come from feeling like you’re in a good place, and you almost don’t want to advertise that you’re in a good place because you feel that guilt—you know what I’m saying. And that sucks because sometimes it is nice to share that you’re in a good place.

Maybe it’s because I had such a fucked-up childhood, but I think about survival a lot, and I think about joy as a means of survival. Like, I want to be engaged with the world as much as I can be, but it’s also about being able to understand that you can’t be consumed and swallowed up by everything that sucks or you will simply not survive.

JEREMY: Yeah, it’s true. And I think that was the main reason why so many people’s brains just stopped working over the pandemic. Because all they were inundated with was all of the horrible, negative things that were happening, and they made that their personality. We all know a lot of people that didn’t come out of that mentally well.

A lot of our brains were broken.

JEREMY: Totally.

Jeremy Bolm’s No. 3 Song of 2023:
OPEN CITY “Return Your Stolen Property is Theft” (Get Better)

OK, so we’ll start with Open City. Of all the songs you picked, this was the one I thought sounded most like a song you would sing.

JEREMY: You know, it’s kind of funny sometimes when I find myself being attracted to stuff that lives in the world of stuff that I find inspirational—like, this echoes a lot of bands that are in my friend group. In a lot of ways it has a very modern D.C. sound. It doesn’t hurt that it has both Dan Yemin and Andy [Nelson] from Ceremony in it; I mean, they both also play in Paint it Black. But I really like Rachel Rubino's voice, specifically in this project. I like the sort of talking, rambling energy that you can hear in a La Dispute or mewithoutYou or even a Drug Church or a Lungfish or something like that. There are just a lot of cool aspects to how this song is delivered, and how it’s hyper-aggressive while also feeling a bit dialed back in the vocal delivery at parts.

I like the song title too, and I’m curious if it’s supposed to be a take on that Karl Marx line—which is, “property is theft.” And it’s interesting that it came out so close to the new Paint it Black record, which is also really good.

So close. It was kind of like, what is the wisdom behind this?

JEREMY: Yeah. I mean, sometimes you have to wonder if it even is wisdom or it’s just like, “Hey, look, these are both done and there’s different labels that are involved and they both want it out.” So I guess this is just what it is, you know? It doesn’t help that both record covers are in black and white though [laughs].

But I’ve been following Open City since they started because they were sort of sold to me as Dan Yemin doing almost a screamo band, and I was like, “I’m listening!” I’m sure he would say, “That’s not what that is.”

Listening to this song again, though, I feel like Open City almost distill the last 40 years of hardcore: there’s punk, there’s noise, there’s angularity, there’s “proper” hardcore. There’s all these little pieces that have floated around in the last 40 years on this record. And I love that there was this quote I read where Rachel said something like, “I like Hatebreed and I like Bikini Kill. What does that tell you?”

JEREMY: That rules. I’m always going to be a sucker for when you can hear the passion in a vocal performance—as obvious and as cliché as that might sound. But when you hear the ramping up of certain lines and even the possibility that it was done in one take, that kind of energy behind a vocal performance will really sell me on a band. When you can hear that this person means it. I am way less interested in a punk or hardcore vocalist who is probably singing line by line and just trying to make themselves sound as hard as possible as opposed to as honest as possible.

I’m trying to think, but have you ever written any explicitly political songs with Touché?

JEREMY: My other band, Hesitation Wounds, that’s kind of where I put that stuff. Touché had a pro-gay marriage song on our very first record, the song that Geoff Rickly sings on, but that was our first record. After that I feel like all the songs just became about my own personal situations. So I then reserved writing other stuff for the other project because it felt like keeping them separate made more sense. Like, if there was a political song on Stage Four that would be extremely jarring [laughs].

Anti-Matter’s No. 3 Song of 2023:
FIDDLEHEAD “The Deathlife” (Run For Cover)

Obviously, with you making Stage Four, we’ve had personal conversations about “death songs” before, and it’s interesting that between the two of us, there is more than one death song on our lists. But for me, “The Deathlife” isn’t exactly about death. I look at this as a song about depression. And as someone who lives with depression, I don’t actually think there are a ton of great hardcore songs about it. The opening lines to this song really connected with me though. Pat [Flynn] says, “I get depressed, so I do some more / It’s just a dose of sadness, but I don’t want to do it more.” It’s a weird analogy, but I compare my living with depression to living with alcoholism: It’s not something you can “cure.” Like, even when I’m happy I still live with depression, and even when someone is sober, they still consider themselves an alcoholic.

I see depression as something that comes in waves for me. They’re going to come. There’s no way to stop them from coming. The question I deal with is: Do I indulge in these feelings and make them grow? Or do I sit with them, as they are, and just let them be until they pass? Because when I was younger, I had this realization that there was this perverse pleasure in indulging in your depression. And that’s dark. So the fact that he talks about depression in drug terms—like, “a dose of sadness” or wanting to “do it”—that just hit me.

JEREMY: I know it’s different for a lot of people, but I think there’s this aspect [of depression] where you’re convinced from the public conversation about it that you’re supposed to keep it at bay. You’re always supposed to keep it at bay. You’re not supposed to indulge it. There’s a great Patton Oswalt bit where he talks about going off his meds, and he’s like, “I felt bad! I wanted to let it have a little fun! Let’s put on The Princess Bride twenty times in a row!” [laughs] But that’s what I think about: We work so hard to make it not a thing, whether it’s therapy or medication or whatever it is. But there can be a comfort that can come with just accepting. It’s probably not healthy to accept it and just live in the moment of it for long periods of time, but…

Well there’s “accepting” it and there’s letting it consume you. I didn’t have any self-awareness about that when I was younger. I would just feel the wave come and I’d be like, “OK, let’s go under.” But I was making it worse. I was getting into a worse place mentally. So once I sort of cracked that code for myself, it changed everything. I’m not controlled by depression anymore. I don’t get into those states where it’s like “OK, I’m just going to be in bed for four days.”

JEREMY: Yeah, just give me 25 tubs of ice cream and let’s go [laughs].

I also love that “The Deathlife” is a 108 reference. There’s a lyric in 108’s “When Death Closes Your Eyes” that says, “Abandon the deathlife / Reignite the light inside.” The “deathlife” is such a provocative word to me. It has no set meaning, but you sort of imagine that it has something to do with this idea of living while being consumed with the idea of dying. Which is ironic for me because whenever I describe my own experience with the Hare Krishna movement in the ‘90s, I talk about how I was obsessed with death. It felt like literally all we ever talked about was “the time of death.”

JEREMY: Where do you land on this record within Fiddlehead’s discography?

I think it’s my favorite. But also, like, people have talked about this being a trilogy. I don’t know that the band has actually called it that, but I think some people want there to be a resolution to this project. This record is not that. From talking to Pat, and from my own experiences with death and grieving, I just don’t think those kinds of resolutions are real. There’s no such thing as “finishing grief.” There’s no way to tie this band up in a bow. Fiddlehead is going to be exactly what it is.

JEREMY: Yeah. That’s a fool’s errand to expect… “Oh, now write the happy record! You’re good now!” [laughs] Come on.

But I’m sure you got that with Stage Four. People had to have been like, “OK, great. You got that out of your system!” 

JEREMY: The follow-up record still had its toe in the pool of what Stage Four was about, in terms of that being the record written about my life after Stage Four—how that record affected me, and how those years of grieving affected me. I always say I could have written twelve more records about that subject. But for me, I needed to move on from writing about that. I need to explore other things. And that’s not a slight to Pat. I understand being able to write more and more, because it’s sort of an endless well.

I always say Stage Four was the easiest record I’ve ever had to write—as odd as that sounds—because there was an endless supply of things to pull from. Like, oh, do I want to sing about how I felt after I had to bury [my mother’s] ashes? Or do I want to sing about how it felt leading up to her passing? Or do I want to sing about how it felt having to clean out the house? There’s an endless supply of things to pull from. That’s a topic I could go on about all day. But when you’re starting from scratch and having to be like, “What am I singing about today?”—that’s hard.

Truth Cult. Live at Holy Frijoles. Baltimore, MD. July 28, 2022. Photo by Sean Reilly.

Jeremy Bolm’s No. 2 Song of 2023:
TRUTH CULT “Resurrection” (Pop Wig)

I guess we can move this into your second pick. Do you look at “Resurrection” as a death song?

JEREMY: There are certain songs that I just love the overall energy to, where I’m not necessarily paying attention to the lyrics. And that’s funny because I’m such a lyric person. Like, I feel like you can’t even find the lyrics on the internet for this song. That’s when you know you’re true punk, when the shitty lyric websites won’t even rep you [laughs]. But what I love about this song, or what made me choose this song is just… I hate the word “vibe,” but I love the overall vibe of Truth Cult. I like the band Give a lot, and I think Truth Cult is like Give 2.0 in a lot of ways. And I love the juxtaposition between Paris’s vocals and Emily’s vocals in this song. They are so wildly different, but when they’re happening at the same time, they just compliment each other in such a way that it feels very special. It’s almost like a B-52s sort of thing, where there are two completely different styles of vocalists, but when you put them in the same part together, it’s like heaven. It completely makes sense.

This one was actually a blindspot for me. I was aware of Truth Cult, but I never really fully sat down with it. So listening to this song and sitting down with it was interesting because a lot of things came to mind that I wasn’t expecting to come to mind. Like that vocal interplay you were talking about. In my mind, on this song, Paris very much felt like Guy [Picciotto] and Emily felt like Sarah [Shannon] from Velocity Girl. It was very ‘90s indie to me. But it was also cool to hear that in a context where I thought, “This still reads as hardcore to me.”

JEREMY: Totally. I feel like there’s a lot of bands that try to do the D.C. sound, but it’s just so in this band’s DNA—especially the fact that they’re from the Baltimore area—that it just works really well. I got to see them play around Sound and Fury. They played Genghis Cohen, which is a Chinese restaurant on Fairfax with a backroom. It was an aftershow kind of vibe, but it was Gel and Truth Cult in a 40-cap room, and it just fucking rocked. They were so good.

They are named after the Lungfish song, right?

JEREMY: Uh… I would assume so, right? That would make sense.

It feels too egregious not to be.

JEREMY: It would have to be. I love the bands that are just like, “We have to come up with a band name. Get out your record collection and let’s look at some song titles!”

Jeremy, I was in Texas is the Reason [laughs]. Although it’s not like we sounded like the Misfits or anything.

JEREMY: That’s what made your name so cool. It would be like a country band being called Raining Blood.

Am I stupid for not knowing where the name Touché Amoré comes from?

JEREMY: You’re not stupid, it’s a dumb name [laughs]. It doesn’t have any fucking meaning. I just thought it was some words that sounded really cool together, and I was really into French and Italian screamo. So I figured I might as well just insult both cultures and throw these two words together. I never thought I’d ever have to tour in those places, and then I did. And I get reminded over and over, every time we go to France or Italy, that our band name is stupid and it means nothing. I mean, if I want to be literal, I can say that it means “touch love” or that it’s a sarcastic take on love kind of thing…

That’s how I always read it. Like, “Take that, Love!”

JEREMY: That’s sort of what it was supposed to be. But as I got older, I kind of liked the idea of “touch love.” There was a minute when I was contemplating having our last record be called Touch Love as sort of a play on a self-titled record, but I went the other way. Maybe on album nine or something. We’ll see. 

Anti-Matter’s No. 2 Song of 2023:
MANY EYES “Revelation” (Perseverance Media Group)

This is actually a great segue because now that we’re done with the “death songs,” my second pick is kind of a love song. One of the things I’ve written about in Anti-Matter this year is the idea of subject matter in hardcore songs, and how it felt for a long time that certain feelings or ideas seemed off-limits. I still don’t know that there are a ton of hardcore love songs. But obviously, with “Revelation,” for me, this climax of the song where he screams, “Fuck off, I’m in love / What don’t you understand?”—the first time I heard that I just fucking dropped everything. I was like, “I love this song” [laughs].

Obviously, I have my issues with Morrissey. But I’ve always said that when we talk about love songs, it would be boring if every song just said, “I love you,” right? So to be able to write about love, you have to be able to say “I love you” in a million different ways. And so the example I always bring up is, “If a ten-ton truck kills the both of us / To die by your side, well, the pleasure, the privilege is mine.” That’s like, wow. What a way to say I love you. So “Fuck off, I’m in love”—that’s also an amazing way to say I love you. It’s a very hardcore way to do it. 

Are there actual Touché Amoré love songs?

JEREMY: Yes. The opening song on Lament, “Come Heroine,” is totally that. There’s a song called “Harbor,” on Is Survived By, which is very much that. “Reminders,” too, in a way? Like, “I need reminders of the love I have / I need reminders, good or bad.” It trickles in there. I remember when I was starting to write Lament, I went to go see Turnstile and I was talking to Brendan [Yates], and I was like, “I think I’m going to try to write a love record.” And he got excited. He was like, “You should! You should absolutely do that!” But I was like, it’s just so hard to find the ground beyond how it sounds like you’re mad, because you’re screaming. It’s like, at the very base of what punk and hardcore is, you have to yell. So you have to figure out how you want to yell because you’re passionate about a situation and not just because you’re mad.

I gotta say. It’s a really hard thing to pull off. It’s not like saying, “I love you,” but it’s like where I say, “From peaks of blue, come heroine / With several suns you light the way / When each day begins and I’m just a risk at the top of the moon / When I swore I’d seen everything, I saw you”—that’s being sweet [laughs].

Why do you think it’s easier to write about death than it is love?

JEREMY: I mean, that is a very good question. I think it depends on the person. And that’s a really, really big question because you get into this whole thing of feeling like, “Am I someone who feels deserving of love? And if I am, am I even the right person to talk about it?” You get into these inner struggles. Whereas when it comes to death and mourning and things like that, I think you can tell from our fucking output that sadness is the easiest thing to pull from and write from [laughs]. I think that’s what it is. Actually, I don’t know if you planned this, but I feel like this is a good segue into the Spiritual Cramp song that I chose because it’s like the ultimate love song.

Jeremy Bolm’s Song of the Year 2023:
SPIRITUAL CRAMP “Herberts on Holiday” (Blue Grape Music)

This really is an incredible love song.

JEREMY: It’s incredibly sweet! Another aspect of what I was saying about yelling lyrics, and how it comes across if you’re yelling lyrics in a love song, is that it could sound a little silly. I always say that I’m super jealous of bands like the National who can write very straightforward lines here and there, and how there was no way I could come off this way if I sang that lyric—but it sounds so good coming out of this guy.

The chorus in this song is as straightforward and simple as it can get, but it works so well: “If I’m being honest / If I’m being true / I don’t know where I would be / If I never met you.” I’m sure that one way or another, those lyrics have been used 100,000 times before, but it’s the intent and it’s the vocal delivery and it’s the sound of the voice and it’s the music that’s complementing it that makes it feel fresh, you know? I think at the end of the day, that’s what music is. There are no chords that haven’t been used. Everyone has used every chord in every order and there is no song that hasn’t been uncovered yet. I think lyrically, it’s the same sort of deal. Like, one way or another, these sentiments have been said over and over, but it’s how they’re performed and how they sound coming out of the person who wrote them.

For someone who doesn’t write lyrics, I’m actually really lyrically critical. Maybe it’s because I’m a writer. But the thing about this song is that lyrically, yes, the chorus is super straightforward and there’s probably another song somewhere with those exact lyrics. Great. But the real lyrical trick of this song is in the structure of the verses. That’s where my interest went. Because the first verse of the song, to me, I would encapsulate as saying, “You saved me.” And then in the second verse, I would encapsulate that to say, “And now I will protect you.” Which I think is so fucking good. It’s a different and clever way to formulate a lyrical thought. The chorus is doing the job that a chorus is supposed to do: It’s catchy. You will sing along to it by the second time you hear it. It’s not impenetrable by any stretch. But they still created a sophisticated concept through form.

JEREMY: Totally. That’s truly the hack if you write something that you feel has been said over and over. You ask, what are the walls you’re forming around that to where you can still make this your own? Mike Bingham definitely does a good job of that. And the way you explained how those verses are laid out seems exactly right. It’s a great song. The record is awesome. It’s definitely one of my favorite records of the year. I don’t know where you land on it.

I love it. And I’m also really intrigued by Spiritual Cramp because I feel like they’ve been really embraced by the hardcore scene, but they don’t really sound like a hardcore band. Maybe they’re a part of this punk revival that is really happening right now with bands like High Vis or The Chisel or the more street punk or Oi! Stuff… To me, they fall more between Britpop and late-’70s downtown New York—but punk nonetheless.

JEREMY: Yeah, I mean, there’s always the thing where if it’s being played by people who you know are hardcore kids, or were hardcore kids at one point, you’re going to get that seal of approval. They’ve been around for so long now; they’ve been putting out 7-inches and EPs and things like that. And I’m so happy they finally have this LP. But I mean, for years, I would tell Mike, “I don’t want my band to take your band on tour. I want you guys to do cooler shit. Like, go play with the Hives” [laughs]. Because they’re so good at what they do.

Anti-Matter’s Song of the Year 2023:
PHANTOM BAY “Airtight” (KROD)

I’m kind of excited that my Song of the Year is also my most random find of the year. I was literally on Spotify this summer, just being bored, and I typed “hardcore” into the search bar. I was clicking on random playlists and hitting play on random songs I’ve never heard of before. And then all of the sudden I click on Phantom Bay and “Airtight” comes on, and I was completely like, “What the fuck is this?!” That’s such a rare feeling for me to have after so many years of being a hardcore kid [laughs].

I do have to say that as much shit as we like to talk about Spotify and streaming—and we all know it pays nothing and there are issues to be hammered out—but this is an experience, for example, that would have never happened in a record store. I’m not sure I would have stopped everything to look at the Phantom Bay EP in a record store. But not only that, no record store in New York would stock this random EP from a German band. I actually gave their name to Generation Records the other day so they could try to stock it because it’s so good.

JEREMY: I couldn’t believe they were from Germany.

That, too, was my reaction [laughs]. And no shade to my German friends. I’ve toured Germany a lot and I love a lot of German bands. But I actually turned a German friend of mine onto Phantom Bay, and… Hang on, I literally cut and paste what he texted me after listening to it for the first time. He said, and I quote, “How are they so fucking good and from Germany???” Three question marks.

JEREMY: They know! [laughs]

So even German kids are like, “How the fuck is this from Germany?” But obviously, I love the song. It’s a perfect example of a song that gets in and gets out and does everything it’s supposed to do. It’s got all of the things about punk that still excite me.

JEREMY: Yeah, it’s super good. What label are they on?

I think it’s like… KROD? I’ve never heard of it.

JEREMY: I listened to it and I was wondering if it was members of other popular bands in Germany or something, where this is their new thing. But I’m excited. I’m happy you shared this band with me and I’ll probably knock on their door when it comes time to have to pick a goddamn support band in Bremen [laughs]. 

There’s another thing about this song, which is that it has this perfect kind of sneak-attack mosh part. I don’t know if you know this about me, but I am very into mosh parts. And I don’t necessarily mean just beatdown hardcore where everything is a mosh part, but a part in a song with an intentional contrast that is there to make you want to absolutely fuck shit up [laughs]. That just lights up my brain. Like that “Fuck off, I’m in love” mosh part on the Many Eyes song. Or even when I wrote “If It’s Here When We Get Back, It’s Ours”—that was very deliberately a mosh part. Does Touché have a stand on mosh parts?

JEREMY: We don’t do them. But we have like two parts that, if you wanted to, you could. You could push-pit to us. You could pogo to us. But again, to bring up “Come Heroine,” the end of that song has a breakdown part, but it’s more in the same vein as “Understanding in a Car Crash.” Like, theoretically, it’s a mosh part, but it is and it isn’t. I mean, maybe on album six. We just finally introduced our first palm mute part on the last record. It’s very short.

Wait, you’ve never had a palm mute part?

JEREMY: We don’t palm mute. We’re as jangly as you could goddamn get, just jangling the whole time. Jangling and picking notes. That’s been our thing.

OK, then. One last thing. What kind of note do you want to leave on when it comes to hardcore in 2023?

JEREMY: I mean, there’s all the obvious bullet points. It’s way more inclusive. There’s bands that are doing great that have people from all different backgrounds in them. All of that stuff is fantastic, and we all love that.

I do always get nervous when things get so close to the mainstream, because… I mean, you’ve been around long enough. I’ve been around long enough to where we’ve seen this happen a couple of times, and I always get a little protective of it. I just don’t want it to be a fad, because fads die out. Like the way When We Were Young fest [is named] as if there was only one time and place for this type of stuff. Whereas you and I know, and everyone who is probably going to read this knows, that hardcore has been around and it will always be around.

If I get a little protective, it’s because I don’t want people to look at this as if it’s just a time and place. It’s a thing that’s always going to be there and it’s so important to so many people. So as much as I’m happy that hardcore is as big as it is right now, and that so many people are finding things that are going to be very life-changing for them, I just hope they continue to pay it the respect that it deserves. That’s how I feel.

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