Drill For Absentee were gone long enough to be mythologized, but not forgotten. In the twilight of the 1990s, they delivered music that belonged to that merciless intersection between post-hardcore and math rock abstraction, only to disappear before the world could catch up. Twenty-five years later, Strand Of A Lake represents an interruption of silence and a continuation of an unfinished sentence. The LP stitches together Volume 1 and Volume 2, eight tracks written across a transcontinental exchange: Michael Nace and Kevin Kelly sending parts from Philadelphia and Los Angeles, while Ken Kuniyoshi tracked drums in Okinawa. That detail unquestionably matters. Remote projects often sound stitched together, clinical, and robbed of tension. This particular experimentation doesn’t. Every bar feels as if the musicians are standing in the same room, watching each other’s hands, waiting for the smallest cue. The record breaks with the tightrope interplay that defined the best of the late-90s scene, rough guitars locking like gears, rhythms that slip and then realign, melodies that emerge only to fracture the calm aesthetics.
Kuniyoshi’s drumming is unrelenting and crucial to this record. He refuses the straight four, preferring fractured beats that make even repetition sound unstable. At times, he hits with the power of a hardcore drummer, but phrases like someone obsessed with negative space. The drums dictate the push and pull, bursts of haste cut by suspended passages where silence becomes another instrument. It is a clinic in how rhythm can act as a narrative. Nace and Kelly’s guitars work in tandem, not opposition. They approach melody sideways, through stabs of dissonance, half-resolved chords, and arpeggios that feel like they might collapse under their own weight. The sound is abrasive but never sloppy. You hear echoes of Slint’s austerity, Rodan’s raw nerve, and Hoover’s skeletal rigor, but none of it feels borrowed. Drill For Absentee has always sounded like a band using genre conventions as tools, not templates. Here, they carve sharp, angular spaces, then fill them with ethereal and physical resonance. The low ends knit beneath the guitars like counter-arguments, giving each song a density. Instead of chasing hooks, the low end carries harmonic logic, often completing phrases that the guitars leave deliberately unfinished. This effect is architectural and carefully constructed. The mixes leave rough edges intact. Dan Coutant’s mastering respects the dynamics rather than flattening them, and what you hear is a band unwilling to sand down the splinters. Strand Of A Lake insists that imperfection is where the meaning lies. Vocals appear like apparitions. They are not centerpieces or vehicles that carry narrative. Instead, they exist as shouted and murmured fragments cracking into melody. Lyrics suggest moods, sketch images, and then simply vanish. This control keeps the focus where it belongs, on the instrumental interplay. The voice here is also another instrument, no more or less important than the guitars, bass, and drums.
The two volumes mirror each other perfectly. Volume 1 is exploratory, like a series of questions stacked together, preparing the listener for what’s about to come up next. The pieces test their own boundaries, how far can a riff be stretched before it breaks, how long can silence sit before it demands resolution. Volume 2 feels more like a response, more direct, occasionally harsher, as though the experiments of the first half have clarified into statements. Together, they form a never-ending cycle of tension, reflection, escalation, and release. It’s not conceptual in the pretentious sense, but in the way the best records are, designed as a whole, demanding to be taken as one argument. Expert Work Records deserves credit for recognizing the importance of putting this material on vinyl. The label understands that a record like this is not a curiosity but a document that deserves physical weight. The black-and-white sleeve for Volume 1 and the color overlay for Volume 2 give visual shape to the duality between starkness and resonance, austerity and warmth. Mari’s artwork and J. Nardy’s design keep everything direct, in keeping with the music’s aesthetic, no excess, no distraction. Drill For Absentee walked away at the height of possibility, just as post-hardcore and emo were fracturing into countless sub-genres. By returning now, they reveal that their sound was not bound to a moment. It is a vocabulary that remains potent because it was always about tension, structure, and refusal. They never traded in nostalgia or fashion, and so there is nothing here to outgrow.
Listening to this record is to hear a band practicing continuity rather than regeneration. It is not a museum piece, not a late-career indulgence but a live document of musicians still testing the edges of their language. In that sense, it is not only an achievement but also a challenge. Strand Of A Lake proves that rigor, patience, and abrasion still matter. Each return to this double EP reveals new shapes, new tensions, new connections. It asks you to listen the way you would read, with attention, care, and openness to difficulty. Strand Of A Lake is an essential listen for anyone who wants to explore post-hardcore and math rock aesthetics deeply. You should immediately head to Expert Work Records and purchase this gem on vinyl.
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