Casey’s 2024 album How To Disappear marked a return for the Welsh based five piece after a five year hiatus where there future was uncertain. The band broke up in 2019 after lead singer Tom Weaver suffered severe health complications, reuniting a few years later once they realized they collectively had more to say. The result was a record that delves deep into the concept of death as a concept– the acknowledgement of it’s eventual inevitability, the fear of it that can grip you, and the exploration of how it impacts those who you leave behind.
If that feels heavy, it’s because it is. But where Casey truly shines on How To Disappear is how they tackle those themes head on without it being heavy-handed or overly romanticized. Much like Touché Amoré’s 2016 album Stage Four, the beauty lies in how the band navigates these incredibly complex emotions in a way that feels therapeutic and clairvoyant, almost as if you’re sitting in on a therapy session that eventually resolves itself with an act of acceptance of the truth that some day we all will pass and leave behind those who love us. These lyrical motifs are punctuated sonically with widescreen soundscapes and ambient echoes that rise to a boil before they overflow and give way to violently heavy guitars that sound like a thunderstorm overpowering everything in its wake. It’s a soaringly cinematic experience, one that is restrained in one moment and fully unleashed in the next. It is pretty, achingly so, in it’s totality.
During my numerous re-listens of this album (I’ve burned through it at least twice a month after it was released in early January) I kept thinking back to an interview that Keanu Reeves did with Stephen Colbert. Reeves was asked what happens to us when we die and, after a brief pause, he gave a succinct but deliberate answer– “I know the ones who love us will miss us.”
The truth in that moment is powerful, and is similar to the feelings How To Disappear churned up within me. There is no avoiding the eventual fate all human beings will experience at the end of their lives, but what is indelible is that we continue to live on in in the hearts of those whom we love and those who love us. And that’s something that I’ll always draw upon whenever that feeling of existential dread creeps up on me– to live a life worth living is to live a life worth remembering. Not with grand gestures or extravagant expressions, but in simple acts of kindness and love.
Standout Songs: “I Was Happy When You Died”, “Sanctimonious”, “For Katie”, “Bite Through My Tongue”, “Puncture Wounds To Heaven”, “Blush”, “How To Disappear”
