Criteria To Release New Album On May 22nd; Share New Single “Lean Out”

Spartan Records and Criteria are pleased to present “Lean Out,” the latest single to be lifted from the Friday, May 22 release of SEIZE!, the forthcoming studio album from the Omaha indie-rock staple featuring Stephen Pedersen (ex-Cursive). “This song is about when frustration boils over into action,” Pedersen said. “Bluntly, this song is about letting off steam over work and how healthy, trusting, generative relationships at work can devolve, change and ultimately frustrate your passion for the job — a professional sob story.” Watch the music video for “Lean Out” on YouTube HERE, and pre-0rder SEIZE! via the Spartan Records store HERE. 

The follow-up to 2020’s Years, SEIZE! is a sonically and thematically heavy record shaped by loss, endings, and the growing urgency to capture life while it’s still unfolding. The album reflects a period of profound personal and professional change: relationships dissolving, chapters closing, and attention turning toward the fragile beauty of the present. 

Recorded over seven winter days at ARC Studios in Omaha with producer Matt Bayles and mastered by Ed Brooks at Resonant Mastering, SEIZE! channels what Pedersen calls “pristinely heavy rock,” drawing from the symphonic guitars of Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream era, the pulse and syncopation of Battles, and the tension of Quicksand. Pedersen had the following to share about the album: “These songs feel like alchemy under pressure — love as the undertow, empathy as survival, and seizing the moment as it seizes you.”

SEIZE! as in seize the day, and seize as in halt, collapse, and end. This is not Criteria’s a comeback record. It is a document of where a life is right now, rendered in sound. Watch the music video for the Criteria’s first single from this album, “You Maketh Me,” on YouTube HERE.