Commoner

Back in October 2025, Commoner announced their signing to Pure Noise with the release of “Breach”. The song came after a couple of EPs they’d already released—not only did it demonstrate their knack for turning anguish into an impassioned and cathartic rush of emotion, but it served as a powerful introduction to the Tucson, AZ band for the uninitiated. Now, some six months later, the four-piece—vocalist Romin Mattison, bassist Matthew Bryant, guitarist Beto Marroquin and drummer Tyler Casillo—can unveil details of their debut full-length, Former Self.

As it happens, “Breach” isn’t one of the record’s 10 tracks. Because while this is an album that’s very much about looking back at the past, it’s as equally concerned with moving forward. After all, your former self could be a version of you from a decade ago—or from yesterday—and even in the six months since that song came out, the band’s style has evolved. “Breach”, the band say, was a stop-gap, an introduction, a bridge between the past and the present. Former Self, somewhat ironically given its title, is a full-hearted representation of who Commoner are now.

But that’s also because they’ve been waiting to transform these songs into accurate representations of themselves. As the cliché goes, you have your whole life to make your debut full-length – and Commoner wanted to make sure they got it right, spending a couple of years honing and shaping them into their current form from when they first started writing them.

“We stressed out so long on this album,” admits Mattison. “We spent so much prep time trying to figure out demos and trying to find out the direction of the album, even down to the artwork.”

In other words, they wanted—and still want—this to mean something, to be special, and so they were working on them intensely for as long as they possibly could to ensure that that was the case. In the end, they brought 17 tracks with them into the studio, and had to cut that down to ten.
“We’d had all of these ideas together since recording the EPs,” says Marroquin, “but we were writing stuff, adding to it, polishing it and putting every ounce of effort we had left into it them. Literally, right up until the last day of January—and we went into the studio in February. But I think we ended up with exactly what we wanted to come out with after two years of working on it.”

“The week before we started recording,” adds Casillo, “our producer told us he hadn’t had a band come in that prepared for an LP in the last couple of years. It was a good feeling, but we still had to bring the hammer down on almost half the work we had done.”

If casting aside those seven songs presented a slight challenge for the band, the end result is very much worth it. Produced and recorded, like everything the band have ever made, by Zach Tuch, the ten songs that did make the cut combine to create a cohesive journey into the hearts and minds of the band’s former (and present) selves. That was something the band wanted to be very intentional about from the start, because they wanted this album to tell a story and capture a feeling—a series of reflections on childhood from an older, wiser perspective.

And so, opener “Cobalt Blue”—a song written around the same time as “Breach” and which features British nu-gazers Split Chain—sets the tone by diving back into the past, pulling out sensations, memories and emotions from it, then recasting them in the present day. Moody and bleak, it ruminates over what once was while the fire of emotions about the past continues to burn. Throughout, swathes of guitars wash over these songs as the band combine elements of different genres—from post-hardcore to pop-punk to emo—to devastating effect. Truly, these songs feel like post-hardcore classics that seems impossible to have never existed before right now.

Whether that’s the insistent, urgent rush of “Passerby” or the tumultuous rhythms and emotional vulnerability of “Cemetery Dogs”, the unsettling yet soothing jitters of “Sirens A Block Away” or the dark and insistent rush of “Runner Up”, these songs feel simultaneously familiar and exciting, turning despair into a warm, soothing blanket. Just listen to the way the title track transforms from its gentle, fragile and vulnerable beginnings into a behemoth of screams and riffs and exploding sound.
When the record ends with “Appendix”, it’s impossible to not feel the full weight of the journey that this album has taken you on, especially the way the song swells and swells with vigorous feeling, swallowing you up into the past you’ve just experienced. But then, like memories of youth and youth itself, it fades into nothingness, a lacuna that’s just as loud as what preceded because of what preceded it.

“The album has a lot of themes of childhood and your own former self,” says Bryant, “but it also discusses how people around you have changed—and missing somebody else’s former self. We have songs that look back on how you yourself used to be back in the day, but we have songs about how everyone else has changed too.”

It all makes for a moving document about human nature, about the inevitability of growing older, of the self-awareness that who you are isn’t who you were, even if it feels that way. It’s a joint commiseration, celebration and commemoration, all wrapped up in one, but delivered with the exuberance and promise of youth. That’s something that doesn’t translate to just the music or this album, but also the way the band itself operates.

That’s because Commoner take a very democratic approach to songwriting, passing ideas and lyrics between them, letting the undeniable chemistry that flows between them flourish and manifest itself in what they’re writing. Yet they’re also incredibly fastidious about how they write—all four members of Commoner are equally emotionally invested in their songs, and they all have input over every aspect of them.

“It took so many hours to get this record refined and meaning something to everybody,” says Marroquin, “so when these full songs get stamped, there’s a piece of everybody in the track. I don’t think there’s a single song on the record that wasn’t revised by all four of us.”

“And that’s why we work well as a four-piece,” says Bryant, “because the four of us are truly as involved as the next one. We all put in that same effort creatively.”

“And as long as we’re all writing together,” says Mattison, “that’s how it will always be.”
It seems, then, that the former selves at the heart of this record are here to stay.

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