Fiddlehead, the Boston post-hardcore band who share members with Have Heart and Basement, have announced a followup to their very good 2018 debut LP Springtime and Blind. It’s called Between The Richness and it’s due out May 21 via Run For Cover (pre-order). It was engineered and mixed by Chris Teti of TWIABP. Speaking about the album, vocalist Pat Flynn said:

These massive things happened in my life between the first record and this record. It just so happened that I ended up getting married, I had a child, and it was around the 10-year anniversary of my father’s passing. So what if I want to write another record about how I feel about the loss of my father? Will people be like, ‘Pick another topic, dude.’ So, the opening track is called ‘Grief Motif’ because it’s the idea that this is an eternal struggle that will never go away. Take it or leave it, but it will be part of this dude as long as he’s got a pen in the hand.

We started writing this record two weeks after my son was born, and I think it’s a really great way for him when he’s older—and when I’m gone—to say, ‘My father wrote this in the first year of my life. What does that mean?’ Lyrically, I tried to show that there were a lot of profound moments in my life, and in the last song, I tried to write what was explicitly a letter to him.

The name of the record is called Between The Richness because it’s important to me to explore the weird feeling of happiness and sadness, because that’s just where I am right now. My son’s name is Richard and my father’s name is Richard, so it’s literally between the two of them, but it’s the richness of life and the richness of death. It was important for me to capture that perfectly paradoxical feeling; That was the problem I was trying to solve on this record. And I don’t think I solved it, but I definitely feel less stressed out and befuddled by that weird clashing of happiness and sadness.

The album features a new recording of “Get My Mind Right” (which came out as a single in 2019), as well as the just-released “Million Times.” The new song is a little more refined than the debut album and it comes with a big, soaring chorus, but they haven’t abandoned any of their hard-hitting post-hardcore attack. Like the first LP, it fits in with classic ’80s/’90s emo as much as it fits in with newer stuff like Title Fight and guitarist Alex Henery’s band Basement. If you like any of that and haven’t checked out Fiddlehead yet, change that now.

Alex Henery also directed the video for “Million Times,” and you can watch that below…

Tracklist
1. Grief Motif
2. The Years
3. Million Times
4. Eternal You
5. Loverman
6. Down University
7. Get My Mind Right
8. Life Notice
9. Joyboy
10. Heart To Heart