Cloud Nothings’ Life Without Sound keeps the faith despite personal disorientation
Cloud Nothings has always felt like a perpetual work in progress. With each record, the Dylan Baldi-led group takes incremental steps forward, building on its influences—peach-fuzz power pop, scabrous post-hardcore, and furious punk aggression—and creating something more refined and confident. It’s no coincidence that Cloud Nothings’ music is also deeply restless, although Baldi’s songwriting has never forsaken focus or confidence in the name of such uncertainty.
That’s still the case on the band’s compulsively listenable fifth album, Life Without Sound. The record’s lyrics describe scenes of vivid disorientation: feeling uncomfortable in your own skin, losing everything important to you, bone-deep loneliness, and gradual emotional collapse. Yet Life Without Sound’s overall thematic arc involves soldiering through these personal hells, and finding the strength to stay positive and start again. These seemingly conflicting states of being often overlap and coexist (“I knew peace in the terror of the mind,” Baldi sings at one point), which only adds to the complexity.
