There were a handful of years when I had a strange fixation on the post-grunge band Breaking Benjamin. Strange only because my general taste would grow to bend toward alternative and folk music, though a selection of Breaking Benjamin songs have never gone out of rotation for me.
I’d never quite pinned down what drew me to those songs, but this week, Widow7 helped me figure it out.
Widow7 is a Des Moines-based, modern rock band existing adjacent to nu metal and grunge. This past March, the group released Our New Doomsday, an eight-song EP that includes songs like “Hopeless” and “Shadow Me” (both standouts) which were released as singles in 2021 and 2020 respectively.
In 2021, Widow7 also opened for fellow Iowa-grown band Slipknot as part of that year’s Knotfest.
The handful of years I briefly latched onto select grunge/rock sounds came during my high school career. A period where I took court-mandated trips between the houses of two parents — a mom who was stretched thin, and a flagrantly abusive father — while trying to find a sense of personal autonomy.
There was a feeling that this kind of music, when it hit right, could cathartically express my distress.
By and large, Our New Doomsday hits just right.
If you don’t get at least the smallest sense of rebellious self affirmation from lines like “Feels like I’m wasting away … but I got nothing if I ain’t got me” sung to electric minor chords and a storm of drum beats — as in the song “Therapy” — alongside sentiments to burn the world down, then you and I have nothing to talk about.
Songs like “Fire” and “Crooked Flames” deploy rap breaks with degrees of success. In “Fire” the use is brief but contributes to a nice build which, paired with smart sound design, makes this one of the punchiest songs here. Meanwhile, in “Crooked Flames,” the rapping — and song as a whole — never fits together as well as it feels it should despite a killer guitar hook.
Across the album, though, the performers are firing on all cylinders. Vocalist Mark Leon hits both tender melodies and throaty chants with equal proficiency. Jayson Kremf and Jake Schrek on guitars, Seth Peters on bass and Shane Mills on drums are all just as bombastic and relentless as you’d hope for them to be when the songs shift focus to them.
Given these allusions to my own early teenage years, I want to make it clear that I don’t want to paint Widow7’s music as juvenile, rather, I want to illustrate that it is head-bangingly joyous.
I know Widow7 won’t bend my taste away from the more mellow tones I gravitate toward. That said, I can easily imagine that instead of playing “I Will Not Bow” to belt away the bad feelings — as I still do on occasion — I will instead select Widow7’s “Therapy” or “Low Life” as musical medication.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s July 2023 issue.
