The last time we ran a piece on Carrion Spring was in late 2023, around the release of “How it all falls away petal by petal” — a record that already felt like a band finding its footing again after a long break. This new album lands from a different place. “Those We’ve Lost and Continue to Lose”, released on March 6 through Zegema Beach Records, is Carrion Spring’s third full-length and seventh release overall, but it also reads like the result of several years spent trying to make sense of private loss, physical collapse, political horror, and the strange fact of still being here to turn any of it into songs.
The Portland band recorded the album exactly two years earlier, to the day, at Atomic Garden Studios in Oakland with Kurt Ballou, with mastering by Brad Boatright at Audiosiege. It runs 43 minutes, stretches across 12 songs, and was tracked under pressure. There were only four days available. Drums and bass were recorded live together on day one. Guitars and vocals followed at speed. That pace mattered. So did the condition the band were in.
Leading up to the session, Adam Brock Ciresi was deep in what they describe as a brutal flare-up of an autoimmune disease. “It lasted a brutal 3 years, and that time of recording had been the 3rd year of it,” they say. “I was in and out of hospitals, lost a lot of weight, my body additionally wrecked from long periods on heavy steroids to combat the flare. I was so physically, mentally, and emotionally drained that it really had me feeling very stressed out and dispirited by that point.”
That strain wasn’t happening in isolation. Only a few months before the recording, Adam’s mother had died suddenly. Before that, guitarist Steve Son had lost his father. A couple of years earlier, bassist Gareth Welker had lost his mother too.
The album title points straight at that terrain, and the record stays there without trying to tidy it up. It deals with personal grief, but not only that. The writing also turns outward — toward Gaza, colonial violence, school shootings in the US, deaths tied to ICE, ecological destruction, and the broader instability of life under a system the band clearly sees as predatory and unsustainable.
Adam puts the frame around the whole thing pretty plainly: “This album is the amalgamation of 4-5 years of work, ebbs and flows in the writing process, heart ache, struggle, grief, and of course being forced to witness mass genocides.”
That split between intimate loss and larger political ruin is one of the album’s central tensions, and it shows up immediately. “The first two songs right out of the gate express the most important loss of all right now,” Adam says, “which are the utter injustices caused by colonialism, not only in Gaza for the Palestinian people, which is largely what ‘Pocket Full of Poseurs’ is about, but our own history, genocide of the Indigenous Peoples in the US, as with ‘Abject Disaster’.”
Other songs angle at different kinds of collapse. “‘The World Is No Longer a Beautiful Place and I Am Afraid to Die’ is about neoliberal agendas that are tearing apart the stability of life on our planet, a sort of mourning for futures that are no longer likely to come.”
“‘I’m Not Fighter’ is reflecting on how common it is in our country for people to die at the hands of a war machine that profits from all of these efforts, including mass shootings, unjust deaths at the hands of ICE, and so on.”
“‘Paraquat’ was written during an earlier part of the pandemic, loosely about how we would consistently hear of the amount of deaths of folks due to Covid on a daily basis.”
And “‘So Long and Thanks for all the Microfiche’ is a commentary on the Trump adminitration, how our government has been unraveling during late stage capitalism, and the eventuality of its current iteration’s demise.”
Even when the writing gets broad, the songs don’t come off like position papers. They still feel rooted in specific moments, sometimes almost embarrassingly specific. Adam says “‘You Feel Like a Dickhead’ was written at the time when that billionaire drowned in a submarine of his own design LOL.” That line cuts the tension a bit, but not for long.
The most exposed material on the album stays close to Adam’s own life. “‘Carrion Phase Springs Eternal’ is directly about the moments of my mom passing away, and how traumatizing of an experience it was.” “‘Motional’ is about spending weeks in a hospital being told I was facing a strong possibility of not surviving the serious flare up of my autoimmune disease (thankfully I did), with the lyrics being written from my hospital bed.”
That hospital period already surfaced in the 2023 material, but here the context is wider and heavier. Adam says the lyrics for “Motional” were written from the bed itself, during “one of the worst periods of my life I’ve ever gone through.” In the older commentary, they described the room looking out over Portland with Mt. Hood in the distance, and the way long days in that space narrowed down to small, disturbing details — weather moving across the city, flowers brought by family drying out petal by petal, time getting slow and strange. That earlier piece now feels less like a side note and more like a bridge into this record.
The last track cuts even deeper. “‘Those We’ve Lost and Continue to Lose’ is a piano instrumental written very much in the moment, trying to channel the deep sadness and grief I was feeling right after losing my mom, which sort of embodies the entirety of the album’s concept, hence why it was named the title track.” Adam says they recorded the idea quickly on a phone, brought it to the studio intending to replay it on the piano there, and Ballou stopped them: “it sounds perfect the way it is on your phone, more lo-fi and honest, so let’s just use that, and we obliged.”
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That detail says a lot about how the album works. The record was not polished into some ideal shape. In fact, Ballou apparently told them he would have liked two weeks to really shape the songs to their full potential. But that wasn’t the setup. What they got instead was a short, intense session that leaned into impact rather than correction. Adam remembers it as “feeling like a race against time,” with the band having to accept flaws and trust that they would read as human rather than unfinished.
“The songs were recorded very quickly,” they say. “The drums and bass were done live together and completed on day 1, which I think actually helped to capture some of the raw energy we have when we play shows. Guitars and vocals were recorded quickly, feeling like a race against time, so we had to accept many flaws with the hope that they might be received as endearing.”
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There is a practical side to that, but also an emotional one. Adam had just spent the previous month clearing out their childhood home in New York after their mother’s death, moving their father into their home in Portland, and sorting through “40+ years of a complicated family history.” Looking back, they admit it was “obviously not the best place to record an album from,” but they also say the performances came from “an incredibly desperate, emotional, and distraught moment in time.”
What kept the process from collapsing altogether was the band itself. Adam is clear about that. “The rest of the band were my absolute rock, super sympathetic and helpful for me as I processed these extremely heavy life experiences.” They describe nearly a year of weekly evenings spent writing together, not just building songs but sharing grief. With Gareth and Stevie going through recent parental losses too, that connection became part of the record’s shape. “We could relate to each other for what our personal experiences of grief were, and had a lot of mutual support for each other. I believe this kind of love had a positive impact on our writing process together.”
The album also closes a chapter that reaches further back than the last couple of years. In the first email around the release, Dave Norman described it as, in a way, “13 years in the making.” That number makes more sense once Adam lays out what happened between the self-titled LP in 2019 and now.
After that record, Carrion Spring toured the east coast with Soul Glo, played New Friends Fest for the first time, and then started to come apart logistically. Guitarists John and Lee both moved away. The pandemic hit. Drummer Sam Pape became a parent and stepped back. “At the time [it] felt like an actual nail in the coffin for the band,” Adam says.
Still, they kept writing. Some of the riffs that ended up on this album were started then, before the band even existed in a workable form again. The real turning point came from outside. Jeremy Bolm asked Carrion Spring to contribute to the “Balladeers Redefined” compilation.
With everyone scattered, Adam recorded everything for the song themself except drums, which were handled by the band’s first drummer. That track was an early version of “Supervisionary,” done in Adam’s basement with limited gear. From there, the band slowly rebuilt.
Gareth Welker came in on bass. Steve Son joined on guitar. Adam switched from bass to guitar. They went through a couple of drummers, wrote part of the record with the original drummer, then finished the rest with Ben Scott, who recorded the album with them. Since then, Ben has left, and Sam Pape — Carrion Spring’s main drummer from 2013 to 2020, also known for Rainmaking — has rejoined now that family life allows it. Adam describes the current lineup as half older Carrion Spring, half post-pandemic Carrion Spring, then laughs at the image: “It feels like some Captain Planet type shit right now haha.”
That mix of old and new matters because Carrion Spring never really returned as a nostalgia project. Adam’s life now is far from where it was in 2014, when the band were touring the US and Canada, meeting people who still orbit the same scene, and playing places like ABC No Rio — a venue Adam had known growing up in New York. Back then they were also painting constantly, skateboarding all the time, and starting the solo project Said Goner. Some of that has changed, some of it hasn’t.
“This question almost caused me a slight existential crisis haha,” Adam says. Then they answer it straight. They now teach at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, where they had earned a master’s degree in 2017 and started teaching the following year. “Being an art teacher was a huge goal of mine,” they say, “so though it’s not always easy, it’s still been something of a dream.” They paint fewer murals now, usually one or two a year, but more deliberately, and spend more time in the studio working on portraiture and other personal material “trying to balance beauty, grief, rage, and whimsy.”
And the skateboarding part did not disappear. It got stranger, maybe better. “Last year I decided to fulfil another childhood dream and have a mini skatepark professionally made in my driveway.” Adam says they skate it constantly outside the wet Portland winter and are “surprisingly better at skating now than my 2014 self.”
There are other threads still hanging too. Said Goner is one of them. Adam says they recorded a full-length a few years ago, couldn’t get a label commitment, and shelved it. “I foolishly shelved it,” they admit. But with the new Carrion Spring album finally out, they say they now have more room to return to it and plan to release it this year. They also mention Déraciné, with members of Coma Regalia and Gas Up Yr Hearse, and another band called No Energy with members of Life At These Speeds, both with full-lengths in progress.
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That wider creative context helps explain why Carrion Spring’s return doesn’t feel stiff or overly mapped out. The band seem to have come back gradually, through friendship, habit, and unfinished songs that refused to stay unfinished. Adam says they are already several songs into another album. They also say the current live versions of the new material feel tighter and more dynamic than what ended up on tape, which makes sense given how fast the recording happened.
There’s also the local environment around them. Asked what Portland’s screamo and hardcore scene looks like now, Adam doesn’t hedge: “Portland’s scene has been thriving! In the 19 years I have lived here, this is the biggest I have ever seen of it.”
They point to a scene run largely by younger people, with older heads still very active, and name bands like Rhododendron, Kill Michael, The Names of Our Friends, Rainmaking, Spares, and Alien Boy as part of that current picture. They mention 777 Booking and MallBrawlReds Booking, who in 2025 opened their own space, High Limit Room, where shows now happen multiple times a week.
They also mention Blackwater, long a staple in Portland punk, now in a new location, and the continued importance of house shows and basements. “It’s wild to still be playing basements in the city almost two decades later,” Adam says, “but they are always still such soul enriching experiences, one that we do not take for granted all these years later.”
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All of that leaves “Those We’ve Lost and Continue to Lose” sitting in a particular place. It’s a comeback record, but not in the neat sense. It’s a document of a band reassembling itself while carrying years of accumulated damage. It pulls from songs written across four or five years, shaped through lineup changes, illness, death, political rage, and a recording session that seems to have run mostly on urgency and trust. The end result is not presented as polished closure. It’s more like a record of what was still unresolved when the red light went on.
There’s even a small technical detail that says something about the release’s physical life: the album is out on 12-inch vinyl, including a run of 250 white/green color-in-color records with red and black splatter. But the more telling detail is probably that lo-fi phone recording left at the end. Ballou heard it and said not to clean it up. In the context of this album, that was probably the right call.
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Carrion Spring are also set to appear at the ZBR Fest 2026 pre-show and the main fest, with the release framed by years of friendship, planning, recording, and the slower, messier work of keeping a band alive after it should have maybe been easier to stop. Adam doesn’t romanticize that process. They describe it as grief, struggle, and trying to hold onto each other through it. That tone carries through the whole album. So does the title. It doesn’t sound like metaphor for its own sake. It sounds like a plain description of what the band were actually dealing with.
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