Eddy Marflak spends his days running an intervention and accountability program for men who have caused harm to their partners — a job he fell into during the pandemic, tied to his upbringing, showing up directly in his writing. By night, he plays bass and sings in Closedown, a post-hardcore/post-punk band from Cleveland, Ohio. The connection between the two is not incidental.
“The Doldrum Sound,” out April 13, is the band’s new four-track EP and their most post-punk-leaning release to date. It’s exactly the register we’ve been gravitating toward lately — that space where post-hardcore tension doesn’t collapse but opens up, where the atmosphere turns spacious and picks up a little death rock around the edges.
Final Gasp carved something similar when they appeared on IDIOTEQ recently, though the style is quite different here. Closedown are doing something adjacent but clearly their own: traces of Mil-Spec or Abuse of Power’s refinement in the architecture, but the feel is more interior than either. Organic. Genuinely hard to pin. And yes — is this even hardcore? You tell us.
Previous EPs leaned harder into screamo; post-punk has always been present in the mix but here it leads. Marflak describes the shift as natural: “this release seems like a bit of a pivot for us aesthetically, but the shift felt very natural for these songs.”
The unreleased material apparently brings the screaming back. In the context of their catalog, and live especially, the different registers hold together.
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Sequencing and transitions are a real preoccupation for the band. Most of their peers, Marflak notes, write transitions “to be as jarring and violent as possible” — Closedown went the other direction.
“We wanted it to feel like a conversation where you’re not really sure how you got there by the end.” The phrase they keep returning to — making difficult things feel simple and sometimes deceptive — doubles as a structural allegory for how trauma actually operates.
“It’s not always one catastrophic event,” Marflak writes, “it’s a collection of many experiences, it’s only in hindsight that we realize we weren’t in control of where we ended up, but its our burden to redirect and reclaim autonomy.”
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His work feeds directly into this. The men in his program made choices rooted in “power and control and rooted in their own insecurities, unprocessed trauma, and socialization” — not excuses, Marflak is clear, but sources of understanding. “The only way the hurt stops is if they decide to unpack their trauma, face their insecurities, unveil the mask of ‘male identity’ and develop empathy for the partners they try to control. It is only in their own healing that they can begin to make amends with the world around them. It is only in accountability that they can become their authentic selves.”
Authenticity, identity, healing — not just lyrical themes, but the actual operating principles of the band as people.
Recorded, mixed, and mastered by Flagstone Audio. Photography by Steven Rice, model Bree Murray, artwork by Peter Kratcoski, layout by Marflak. Closedown is Ryan Crawford, Nick Amato, Robert McBride, and Eddy Marflak.
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