Downward

It was just over a year ago that Downward made a bold mission statement with the release of their second full-length. Arriving seven years after their eponymous debut, Downward II is a record that the Tulsa trio—vocalist/guitarist Drew Richardson, bassist Severin Olsen and drummer Tollie Pugh—still consider what they’ve termed their “second debut”. In other words, it’s the first record that they’ve released that they feel accurately captures who they are.

Formed while Richardson and Pugh were still at school, Downward evolved quickly from what the former terms a “kind of shitty in a cool way” shoegaze band into the band who captured themselves on Downward II—a dark, paranoid and lugubrious reflection of reality that seeps into your bones from the moment opener “Request Made” kicks things off. Beautiful yet simultaneously unsettling, these are songs that, on paper, should offer some kind of soothing comfort, but which instead combine to make you question your entire existence. In a cool way.

Recorded and engineered by Kendal Osborne at The Closet Studios in Tulsa, Downward II—which was made with guitarist Hunter Senft, who has since left the band—leaves a deep and dark impression that’s hard to shake once you’ve heard it. Poetic yet unabashedly honest, these songs are pure catharsis, subtle yet powerful expressions of self on which form completely mirrors function, guitars exploding like breaking hearts after quiet whispered confessions build up to breaking point.

“The band’s music has always kind of been a reflection of our lives and where we live and our friendships and our relationships,” says Richardson. “Looking back on some of our earlier music, it was a true emotional outlet for me at the time. I was on my way out of high school and super driven to do music, but I felt stuck where I was geographically, as well as in terms of my place in the world.”
That pent-up frustration and uncertainty was definitely salient on that first record, but it thoroughly bled into Downward II as well. Indeed, it’s still viscerally present, not least in the ominous, slow-motion tension of “Darkscreen” and the poignant and beautiful helplessness of “Out Of Luck”. Elsewhere, the relentless anxiety of both “Perfect Food” and “The Waltz” reach deep inside you, pull out your heart and guts, leave you empty and desperate and wanting more than whatever it is that you have. Much of that, Richardson explains, is a reflection of the band’s hometown, the way that Tulsa sinks its teeth into you and doesn’t let go. Yet while that remains, the purpose of the music and the band has shifted.

“It now feels like we have a mission,” he explains. “It’s not so much for ourselves anymore. We just want to make something that’s beautiful and that’s going to be around, but the melancholic and dark angle to Downward’s music is really just us trying to make something that feels like the environment around us. Oklahoma is very beautiful, but it’s really bleak and kind of shitty and tries to kill you every spring.”

He means because of the tornados that frequently terrorize the area during that season. As such, Oklahoma is, he says, “in the band’s DNA”, and it serves as an important and essential part of Downward’s identity—both then and now—and courses through this record like, well, a tornado, albeit one that’s only subtly violent.

Still, then and now combine to ferocious effect on this album, as does that omnipresent threat of oblivion looming on Oklahoma’s horizon. Of course, Downward use that feeling and those emotions in a more general sense, so that they transcend that initial inspiration to represent both a more universal existential malaise and more personal emotions. It’s what makes this record a complete listening experience, a perfect snapshot of a time and place in the band’s lives, a harrowing yet comforting journey through a world that both is and isn’t your own.

That’s not in any way jeopardized by the new material. In addition to the album’s original ten tracks, it comes with three bonus recordings. One is “Leechy”, which was included as an unlisted song with physical versions of the record. The other two—“Drawl” and “Get Some”— are recently re-recorded versions of tracks initially written during the sessions for Downward II.

“They’re a little bit faster and a little bit higher energy than what’s largely on the album,” says Richardson. “I think we kind of wanted to stretch our legs a little bit.”

It also serves as another marker between then and now—the emphatic reflection on what was and the potential for what could and will be in the future with the backing of Pure Noise.

“This definitely feels validating to the 16 and 17 year-old versions of us who were making Downward I,” says Richardson. “At that time, there was no roadmap at all. There was no horizon. And I still just want to continue making music that’s true to us. And I would hope that it ignites somebody somewhere to do the same, to just make the music that’s in your heart and try as hard as you can to make it good.”

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