With their debut album »Directions«, Knumears continue the decades-long screamo/post-hardcore tradition as a passionate love letter to the scene, while at the same time shaping a haunting, timeless sound that shapes a new generation of underground musicians. Knumears are aware that no band exists in a vacuum. They are the embodiment of a sonic tradition that has been shaped and shaped over decades and can only be carried on by those who truly appreciate them. Whether you call it screamo, skramz, post-hardcore or otherwise, it's a sound that has outlasted the changing musical currents of the years and is now influencing a whole new generation of underground musicians. Knumears' debut album, »Directions«, is both a love letter and a cartography project that explores the profound history of a complex scene while creating an exciting blueprint for a new scene. Knumears are not only a group of passionate musicians, but also friends whose bonds are just as important as the music they make together. Since 2021, the Knumears (bassist Dante Garcia II, drummer Frankie Lopez and vocalist/guitarist Matthew Cole) have been writing, touring and playing non-stop. They have evolved from sold-out local shows with cheering, climbing, screaming and dancing youth to national tours and are getting the same enthusiastic response across the country. But away from the tour chaos, the group also found growth in their private lives, strengthening old bonds with those at home, discovering new connections and cultivating their own worlds. "We all somehow found ourselves and made new relationships of all kinds," says Cole, reflecting on the making of the album. "There have been many changes for each of us." At first, all these personal upheavals were not exactly conducive to writing a new album. The band was supposed to record with legendary producer/engineer Jack Shirley (Deafheaven, Loma Prieta, Touche Amore), but the band's process felt a bit stagnant until it suddenly wasn't: "We all had a lot of trouble being creative," Cole explains. "We had all found an outlet in other projects while we were trying to write this album. But a few weeks before our time with Jack, we sat down together and basically wrote the entire album. We rehearsed three times a week, probably for a month and a half, and it practically flowed out of us." The result is an album that sounds exceptionally haunting - even for a visceral genre like Screamo. Knumears make use of a sound that is hyper-immediate and yet notoriously difficult to define: it developed from the primal mud of hardcore in the late 80s and earned the addition of "post" in the truest sense of the word, before developing into something even more emotional and musically chaotic in the 90s with bands like Heroin, Pg. 99 and Orchid. The sound continued to evolve with another boom in the late 2000s/early 2010s, when Loma Prieta, Touche Amore, and others condensed the music into something more direct and sometimes even catchy in their own biting way. Now, Knumears and their contemporaries are at the forefront of the modern screamo landscape. Tracklisting Introduction One Light, Sunshine My Name Breaking Ground Directions Untitled Bridged Fade Away