A firefighter started journaling at the firehouse about what emergency work does to a person over time, and what it uncovers about everything that came before it. After calls, in the smoke, his mind kept going back to the same place: late-’90s Cleveland, his old band Al & the Coholics, and a friend who overdosed alone in a Wendy’s bathroom.
That journal became a novel called “Coholic.” The same past also runs through Saints of Lorain‘s debut album “Those Dark Roads,” out June 15 on Eleventh Hour Recording Company and streaming exclusively today on IDIOTEQ.
Saints of Lorain carry more than 25 years of Cleveland underground punk history, tracing back to late-’90s band Al & the Coholics.
Their 2025 EP “Before We Were Saints” looked back at the recklessness that came first.
Cleveland Music Awards named the band Best Punk Band of 2025. Punk Rock Magazine gave them Bass Riff of the Year for “Drunk & Dangerous.” They have been described as a band “that’s been to the bottom and clawed their way back.”
The EP cover already hinted at the cost: Saints drummer Rob Young photographed at his brother John’s gravesite. John was the drummer for Al & the Coholics, Rob Young’s brother, and the person Nick Pshock keeps returning to throughout “Those Dark Roads.”
When Saints of Lorain came together and Rob agreed to play drums, Pshock learned about the promise Rob had made to his brother: he would never let the music die. After that, the decision to go back and face the past was solidified.
“But you can’t skip the breakdown,” he says. “You can’t go from reckless to redeemed without sitting in the wreckage first. I can tell from firefighting that’s true. Those Dark Roads is that argument. It’s the unstable mind, the back-and-forth with ghosts, the isolation. Redemption doesn’t mean anything if you didn’t earn it by going through the worst of it first. We’re not there yet.”
Nothing about the album was planned. Once the Saints came together, the songs came out the way they had to.
“Some songs felt like I was talking to John, telling him he’s dwelling on his losses, that he needs to let go,” Pshock says.
“Other songs felt like he was talking back, like he was the one falling apart, all the way to ‘Our Last Goodbye,’ which is about the moment you realize the last time you saw someone was actually the last time, and you didn’t know it.” Al was writing through the same fog from his own angle. “When I took a step back to see what Al was writing, it became fairly obvious to me that he was grieving as well, but in his own way. Then it was just a matter of arranging the songs.”
Musically, Saints of Lorain still pull from the same places: rock ’n’ roll, old-school street punk, garage punk, and some metal.
The record keeps circling the same wound: John’s death, the guilt around it, and the feeling that the past is still talking back. That back-and-forth runs into “Our Last Goodbye,” a song about realizing too late that the last time you saw someone really was the last time.
“Loss is universal,” Pshock writes. “This story is bigger than us. To do this, to go forwards and tell our story, I had to go backwards.”
Pshock also wrote the story into “Coholic,” a novel built from the same past, with the names changed.
In the novel, John appears as Tommy, dead alone in a Wendy’s bathroom from an overdose. One scene from “Coholic” sits close to the center of the album: the hospital room after John’s overdose.
In “Coholic,” the Coholics gather around the hospital bed. Tommy’s father Jack is inconsolable, and Rob sits there while the machines do the breathing. They tell stories, joke through the sadness, and say goodbye before the machines are stopped the next day.
They tell him he sucks. The next day the machines stop. Jack dies a few weeks later when his heart gives out. At the benefit show at Sidetracks, Rob Young plays drums for the Coholics for the first time.
The community shows up wearing Coholic tattoos and the lock-and-chain Tommy used to wear around his neck, some of them tattooed with the same chain and his initials around their own. “Tommy was punk to the end,” the chapter closes.
Al’s old Coholics track “World Without Love” runs as a refrain through the whole project. It’s a song about waking up and running through the years, the institutions, the rebellion, the lost friends, and arriving at the same line: a curse to “wander this earth, this earth without love.”
The album cover, created by Chad Kimes, places the Saint on Lorain Avenue, Cleveland’s main drag. He sits on the curb, head down across folded arms, with Cleveland traffic and power lines behind him.
“That posture says everything,” Pshock says. “He’s exhausted, he’s bearing witness, he’s carrying what we can’t hold ourselves.”
He’s been asked who the Saint is. “I’ve thought about naming him, but if he’s part of all of us, part of everyone following this journey, then it’s not really up to me to name him. I can only say what he means to me. He’s whatever you need him to be at that moment.” Pshock has one private theory. “Sometimes I wonder if the Saint is Him, bringing us all back together, and absorbing our pain so we can eventually let it go.”
“Those Dark Roads” does not end in resolution. Pshock is clear about that.
The redemption part is still somewhere ahead. This record stays with the breakdown.
“When you leave, it follows, and after death it continues to follow,” he writes about firefighting and the rest of it. “You remain together in this sort of purgatory where the stories of the past are kept alive in the minds of those who follow, and you can never die. Your dreams will slowly turn to nightmares, and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.” Then he stops the thought. “Until you learn how.”
“Those Dark Roads” is out June 15 on Eleventh Hour Recording Company. The first 100 copies come on red vinyl with a patch, a sticker, and a CD copy of “Before We Were Saints.”
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