Most bands describing a guitar part reach for the riff. Promise go the other way. “Velvet Noose,” one of five songs on the Padova band’s new EP “Chlorine,” started as something closer to a reflex than a part anyone set out to write. “It wasn’t about writing the sickest hardcore riff of the year,” they say. “It came from the kind of strumming one does to soothe themselves under duress and it became a song from that.”
They place its writing at what most people would call a descent to the bottom, somewhere between self-therapy and an extract from journaling done on the same days the music came together. It arrived during an early morning, out of a sense of total loss of control and the poor decision making that tends to follow.
The playing mirrored that. It was a hard song to finish, and the band’s hope for it is modest and specific: that anyone who can truly relate feels seen, and a little less lonely.
That mix of bleak source and physical release runs through the whole record. Promise describe the writing period as one long season rather than a single crisis, a stretch where the basics quietly stopped working. Sleep, relationships, the sense that you’re steering your own life. Some songs came fast, the way things do when you’ve held them too long.
Others took longer, and the writing was part of getting through. The line they pull from their own bio, “the slow work of finding meaning in suffering,” wasn’t a thesis they set out to prove. “It’s what we noticed afterwards, looking at what we’d made.”
They’re careful not to oversell that idea. “We’re wary of the version of this conversation that makes pain sound noble or productive. It isn’t. Most of the time it just wastes you.”
What interests them is the small shift that happens when you sit with something long enough to make a song of it. As they put it, “the admitting of being stuck is itself the first thing that isn’t stuck.”
“Chlorine,” the title track and second single, is where that lands hardest.
The band named the EP after it on instinct, drawn to its minimalism. The music came together fast, helped by the more functional dynamics in the room, and they kept some of the original takes from the first demo rather than chase a cleaner version.
“We went for it, the best ideas won and the outcome was a manifesto for the entire EP.” Lyrically they call it one of the most honest things on the record: “the exhaustion of being in motion without arrival, a kind of poisoning that’s both inflicted and self-administered.”
Then the reversal they keep coming back to. “Listening back to it though, it feels a lot like fighting back, rather than giving up.” Their summary of the contrast holds for the whole EP: “A lot of these songs read as trapped on the page and feel like movement in the body.”
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The sound carries it.
This is big, melodic post-hardcore with weight behind it, the kind that hits hard while staying emotional. For listeners orienting by reference points, Promise offer Defeater, Touché Amoré, Svalbard, Landscapes, Deafheaven and Converge. The EP runs five songs (Hell, Velvet Noose, Chlorine, The Weight, Phantom Limb), with “Hell” out as the first single and “Chlorine” following on April 25. It was recorded at Studio73 with Riccardo “Paso” Pasini. The full EP arrives May 29, streaming in full here on IDIOTEQ for release week.
When the band talk about what they want the record to do, they keep it small.
“We’re not expecting to change lives with this record, but we hope that someone listening to it in the middle of their own version of what we were in feels a little less alone. That’s what hardcore did for us.”
That debt to the scene.
Promise have watched hardcore in Padova and Venice grow to a point that, measured against the first DIY shows in 2012, reads as almost unbelievable to them. They remember rooms of 20 people, a couple of local bands opening for Expectations in a tiny venue. The most recent 100% Hardcore Fest had Arkangel and Crush Your Soul headlining to a packed room.
“Mental, really,” they say. Years of going to shows across Europe and the UK gave them a yardstick, and now their own local scene resembles the established ones abroad: people who genuinely care and turn up to almost everything, full rooms regardless of who’s playing.
Some of the band came up through other groups in earlier eras, including The March of Seasons, Dearest Enemy and Old Hag. They’re clear that 2007 was a different world. When The March of Seasons played a reunion opening for Balmora at last year’s 100% Hardcore Fest, it felt like proof of how far things had moved.
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“There’s no way that would’ve happened 20 years ago.” They credit collectives like @pariahposers37 and the Venice Hardcore crew for the booking and organising that built it, work they figure can only come from years of relentless effort and real passion.
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Their closing pitch isn’t for the EP. It’s for the country. Anyone planning a holiday around hardcore should look at Italy: the shows, the food, the weather, the cities. Venice Hardcore Fest looked good this year.
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