Wisconsin’s Endswell have spent the last few years pushing Midwest emo guitars into heavier post-hardcore, but their new EP gets especially close to the people inside the band. “Everything Confided Will Be Forgotten“, released September 25, has songs written in the apartment where three of them lived, lyrics shared between members for the first time, an apology after a fight, and memories of people Maxwell Culver thought would always be around.
Endswell formed in 2022, with members also connected to Excuse Me, Who Are You?, Tiny Voices and Kule. “Heart Container” arrived in 2023, followed by the “Keepsake” EP in 2024. Joey Burcham recorded, mixed and produced the new eight-track release.
The band’s own shorthand for what they play is “heavy emo music”, and you can hear where that comes from on songs such as “Frame Your Face”. Twinkling guitar parts sit next to much heavier chords, Maxwell’s vocals move from harsher delivery into harmonies, Kyle Kinney joins him on backing vocals, and the song eventually drops into a breakdown.
“Oversharing Is My Business… And Business Is Good!” reaches further into the early 2010s post-hardcore that Endswell jokingly call their “inner ‘amazingcore’”, starting with jangly chords and bright guitar lines before slowing down for vocal harmonies from Maxwell and Joey.
For the full EP, the band gave IDIOTEQ a track-by-track account of where each song came from.
1. “A Thesis on Death and The Positive and Negative Aspects of Giving Up”
The opener starts with Maxwell wondering whether he still wants to be doing this at all. Music and being in a band have been a big part of his life, and the first verse catches him questioning whether the love for it is still there.
“Thesis is a song where all the meaning sits in the verses. In the first verse, it’s me looking at, in this case, doing music and being in a band and kind of saying ‘Do I really still wanna do this? Like is this something I still have love for?’”
The second verse was written with Luke and Kyle, the first time either had collaborated on Endswell lyrics. The chorus was much simpler. Maxwell liked the words together and left them that way.
“The chorus to the song lyrically doesn’t really have much meaning. I just felt like the lines sounded cool and flowed well into each other, but if someone can listen to it and it means something to them, even better!”
2. “Bad News Beers”
“Bad News Beers” has Maxwell talking to the person he was in high school. He wonders whether that kid would be happy with where he ended up, while looking back at things that hurt then and still haven’t completely disappeared.
“Bad News Beers is me singing from a standpoint of ‘if I could go back and talk to the version of myself from when I was in High School, or younger, what would I say? Would he be happy with who I am now?’”
Some of those old problems still sting. Maxwell has learned to live with them without letting them decide everything that comes afterwards.
“Essentially it’s me telling myself that years down the line, the things that hurt are still probably going to hurt in some capacity, but that doesn’t mean you have to feel dead inside about it, or that you have to let it define you. We go through a lot of things for a reason, most of it is just growing pains and life lessons.”
3. “Frame Your Face”
“Frame Your Face” nearly stayed outside Endswell. Kyle wrote its main riff and thought it sounded too shoegaze for the band. At the time, Kyle and Maxwell were sharing an apartment. Maxwell heard the riff coming from Kyle’s bedroom and went straight in.
“I heard them playing it from their bedroom in our apartment and I immediately popped into their room and was like ‘yo, can we use that!?’”
It ended up becoming Maxwell’s favourite Endswell song.
The lyrics came from “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”, including a line taken directly from the film. Maxwell was thinking about people you assume will be around forever and what happens years later when some of them are only memories.
“At its core, the song is about how not everyone in your life is going to stay there forever, no matter how much you think they will. It’s about missing those people, and the pain of only living with the memories, so sometimes you wish you could just forget.”
Joey had been sold on the song since hearing its first demo.
“It’s just got this crazy nostalgic, existential feeling for me as soon as the riff kicks in that gives me such a distinct vibe that not many other songs have ever given me,” he said. “I’ve known it was special from the first time I heard it.”
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4. “Halcyon Days”
Kyle, Louie and Maxwell were living together when “Halcyon Days” was written, and their living room doubled as Endswell’s practice space. They worked out the whole song there in one night.
The lyrics came during the same session. Maxwell now considers them fairly vague, written quickly from what was happening in the room at that moment.
“I remember feeling the energy in the room and wrote the lyrics to Halcyon in that moment. I think its a reflection of me looking around at everyone in the band being locked in and thinking about how I never wanted any of this dynamic to change, personal or musical.”
5. “Seraphim”
“Seraphim” had already been sitting around for years. Alan wrote it around 2019 and eventually played it to Maxwell.
“He showed it to me at random and I flipped out because I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Fast forward a few years later to writing this EP, we knew we had to have it on here.”
The band pulled it back out for “Everything Confided Will Be Forgotten”, with Joey helping re-record it and adding more to the production. Maxwell remembers falling asleep on the studio couch and waking up around five in the morning to find Joey still working on the song.
“It’s such a cool track and the perfect breather/vibe shift for the middle of the release. Originally we joked around about the idea of dropping Seraphim as a surprise first single to completely throw people off.”
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6. “Sorry to Jet, but I’m in a Hurry”
Maxwell had been waiting years for an excuse to get StarFox 64 into a song title.
“First off, I wanna say that ever since I started playing in bands/making music, I’ve been looking for the perfect opportunity to name a song after a StarFox 64 reference!”
Behind the title are several disputes from different points in his life. The lyrics deal with people who believe Maxwell has wronged them, then take the story to other people without speaking to him directly.
“Sometimes there’s people in your life that want to hold onto the notion that you’ve done them wrong, and instead of coming to you to hash things out and get back on good terms, they’d rather walk around and slander you to as many people as they can, so this song is kind of a response to all of that.”
The lyrics pull from different situations across a long period, so there isn’t one person or incident sitting behind the whole song.
7. “Oversharing Is My Business… And Business Is Good!”
One of the earliest songs written for the EP came after things went badly between Maxwell and Kyle.
“Probably one of the earliest songs we wrote for what would become Everything Confided Will Be Forgotten! This song is an apology from me to Kyle. It’s essentially me dogpiling myself in the lyrics.”
Maxwell doesn’t give the details of what happened that night, and they aren’t really needed. He knows how he behaved. The fallout with Kyle sent him home to write the entire lyric in one sitting.
“To spare the gory details, I was a massive, massive asshole to Kyle one night, and the fallout of that led me to writing the lyrics for this song in one sitting. Its a harsh critique on my character at the time and some of the things I could be better about as a person.”
He had previously summed up the song even more plainly: “It’s definitely about me apologizing to my friends for putting up with my shit over the years.”
8. “Everything Confided Will Be Forgotten”
Maxwell spent the longest time writing the lyrics to the title track. It reaches back through people he was close to when he was younger, including some who are now distant and others who have disappeared from his life completely.
“Everything Confided Will Be Forgotten is definitely the most personal song to me on the release. I think it probably took me the longest to get the lyrics down for. It’s a love letter from me to all the people I’ve ever cared about in my life, who either aren’t in it as much or around at all anymore.”
Some of its metaphors come from specific situations and experiences from his youth. Musically, it also spreads the vocals around more than most of the EP, with Luke, Kyle and Maxwell trading parts.
“There’s a lot of metaphors in the lyrics about situations and experiences from my youth. It’s also one of my favorite songs on the EP because it’s got Luke, Kyle and I doing vocal tradeoffs and I really, really can’t wait to play it live!”
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