Berlin can make you feel like you’re shoulder-to-shoulder with half the continent while somehow drifting further from yourself. ONLY know that pressure intimately, and their debut album Eyes Wide Open turns it into something sharp enough to cut with.
Out today, the record arrives like a long inhale before impact — the moment when you can’t look away anymore, when the world insists on being seen exactly as it is. The band describe it as a state of “hyper-awareness,” a refusal to shut down even when every instinct tells you to retreat
“Life in Berlin is exciting, but it can also be incredibly challenging,” vocalist Giulio Daverio tells me. “You’re surrounded by people constantly, yet somehow we all end up feeling alone. This individualistic rhythm creates a void that’s hard to fill.” That tension — chaos vs. isolation — is where this record breathes.
The album digs into burnout, class anxiety, the quiet violences that accumulate inside a week until they feel geological. But it’s political only because it’s personal first; every scream is tethered to lived pressure, to the contradictions of simply trying to feel something in a city built to numb.
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When I ask them what stayed with them the longest now that the dust has settled, guitarist Keir Rodan calls the album “eclectic… a reflection of the diversity within our band, both musically and culturally.” And you hear that in every switch between English and Italian, a linguistic rhythm that never feels like a stylistic trick. Giulio says it’s instinctive: “When the lyrics get more poetic or nostalgic, I drift into Italian — it’s memory and softness for me. When things get nervous, raw, or confrontational, I switch to English. It has a sharper edge.”
Nothing here is empty catharsis. “If I go into a song just to vent, it becomes noise pretty quickly — and Berlin already gives me enough of that,” Giulio explains. Instead, he sits with discomfort long enough “to describe it clearly,” turning emotional debris into something someone else can hold.
The production mirrors that clarity. ONLY recorded at Castalian Spring, the same room where they rehearse every week, and the pre-production was disciplined to the bone. “We knew we had one shot at making this the best we could,” Keir tells me. “Almost all the creative decisions were already made — the studio was about performance.” Engineering comes from Oleg Domanchuk, with mix/master by Riccardo Pasini — their third collaboration — tightening the whole thing into something severe but intentional
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Even the artwork pulls from this world. The cover uses a stark photograph Giulio took himself: a quiet, grainy moment that mirrors the emotional undercurrent of the record. “On the surface it looks peaceful, but the longer you sit with it, the heavier it gets. There’s a void in the image, but it isn’t empty — it carries weight.” It’s the same tension inside the songs: collapse and calm, violence and stillness, pain and something strangely beautiful.
ONLY are woven deep into Berlin’s screamo/post-hardcore pocket — a scene thriving off sweat equity and community more than any promise of reward. Asked who’s pushing things forward, Keir fires off names instantly: “Löri, Soastasphrenas, Deshielo, Shiv & Rosa, Neska Lagun, Nava Calma… and especially the people putting on D.I.Y. shows. No one is getting rich off this stuff.”
Touring shaped the record, too, but not in the dramatic, backstage-myth way. Keir recalls a foggy Sunday in Slovenia: “Playing in a converted shipping container on the outskirts of a small town, to maybe ten people. It ended up being one of the most fun shows of the tour. Embracing what’s in front of us has always been how we operate.” That philosophy sits at the core of Eyes Wide Open: presence, even when it hurts.
The story behind the album is rooted in the band’s own collective history, one that stretches across Venezuela, Scotland, and Italy — a convergence of early-2000s screamo roots, hardcore abrasion, and the emotional directness that defines this record. Their path has been fast and deliberate: forming in 2021, dropping their debut cassette via Shove Records, touring Europe, releasing a split with Barabbas, du förtappade, and sharing stages with Pg. 99, Raein, and Jeromes Dream.
And fittingly, its release is a global act of solidarity: the vinyl is co-released by Shove Records, To Lose La Track, Vina Records, Dancing Rabbit Records, Through Love Records, Zilp Zalp Records, and New Knee Records — a network that reflects the same communal, borderless energy that fuels ONLY’s music.
What the band deliver on Eyes Wide Open isn’t just another emotional screamo album. It’s a portrait of three years in one of Europe’s most complicated cities, shaped by burnout, friendship, panic, memory, class tension, and the stubborn desire to keep showing up anyway. To stay present. To keep your eyes wide open even when every instinct tells you to look away.
