The new single from Orlando trio Our Escape lands on today, a week ahead of their full album “Who to Blame?”, and the timing feels intentional. The band has been circling the same question the record’s title poses — not pointing fingers, not absolving anyone, but sitting with the uneasiness of the ask.
Formed in 2018, the group — Mark Neville on drums, Zach Waite on guitar and vocals, and Brian Jett on bass — has carved out a lane where hardcore energy meets a kind of restless curiosity. Their songs lean into sharp rhythms, heavy riffs, fuzzed-out low end, atmospheric guitar layers, and snare patterns that pull in Latin patterns without forcing a point.
People sometimes compare them to Refused or Comeback Kid, but they’re just as comfortable letting older punk DNA show through, calling back to bands like Afi and Snapcase. The through-line is a mix of blunt social commentary and a quieter thread of optimism that they never dress up.
“Siren Skies” grew out of what the band describes as being stuck inside a constant wash of bad news — corruption, alarms, explosions, people shouting over one another while nothing improves.
The track opens with “Hypnotized to believe there is a divide” and closes with “We can wish,” a small shift in tone but a deliberate one. Jett puts it plainly: “We wrote it five years ago out of frustration about how violently divided our society was becoming. We’re proud of the song, but it’s unfortunate that the lyrics feel more relevant than ever.”
Waite frames the whole album around a wider version of the same thought. “Your neighbor isn’t your enemy,” he says. “There are forces designed to keep us angry, afraid, and hopeless, and it’s our responsibility to resist that. Taking responsibility means looking in the mirror and asking yourself, ‘How have I contributed to this angry world? How can I do better?’ I think resistance has to happen in the mind before it can have any positive impact in the streets.”
That tension sits across the record. “Hey Neighbor” leans into satire and goes after what the band calls an “unapologetic critique of political cult manipulation.”
Between the louder moments, the album places short “transmissions,” sketched like fragments of some half-buried wartime signal — a way of stitching the songs together with something slightly off-axis, more atmospheric than narrative.
The closer, “PSA,” shifts the vantage point again, bringing in hip-hop artist Dakari Curtis Marley David. Neville explains why they wanted someone else to finish the record: “We express a lot of feelings and opinions on this album, but we made sure that the last voice you hear isn’t ours. It’s Dakari’s. The song title stands for ‘Public Service Announcement,’ which in this context means: ‘Let’s shut up and listen to the next generation.’”
The visuals push the same message. The vinyl cover shows a muted, almost statuesque figure with a halo made of fingers pointing outward. The whole thing is bright and confrontational, a clash between decay and possibility rather than a clean aesthetic choice.
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“Siren Skies” arrives first, with a full video, and the album follows on November 21. They’re not promising answers — just a moment to look at the same noise everyone else hears and try to figure out what to do with it. Photos by Ivy Neville Photography.
