Blood makes noise

A Quiet Condition, Middle Age, and the Art of Not Getting What You Wanted

Since forming in Baltimore in 2014, Underlined Passages have built a catalog that sits somewhere between guitar-driven indie rock, shoegaze, and the more emotionally bruised edges of post-hardcore. Michael Nestor and Roger Stewart have spent more than a decade refining a sound built on layered guitars, buried vocals, and songs that often seem to reveal their emotional weight slowly rather than announce it immediately. Their relationship with Mint 400 Records dates back to 2015, with recent releases including Landfill Indie and The Accelerationists continuing that evolution.

With A Quiet Condition, the band turns its attention inward. The album is less concerned with the collapse of something than with what happens afterward, the strange realization that the future you imagined for yourself may simply never arrive. It is a record about aging, unfinished ambition, digital invisibility, loneliness, and continuing to want things even after you’ve begun to suspect you’re running out of time.

1. A Quiet Condition feels less like a record about something going wrong than a record about realizing that something you expected to happen simply isn’t going to happen. When did that idea become the center of the album, and did you know you were writing toward it while the songs were being written?

Michael Nestor: Not really while I was writing. The songs came one at a time and I wasn’t thinking about them as a group. It was more when we had them all recorded and I was listening through in order that I noticed they were all kind of about the same thing. Nothing terrible happened to me. Things just didn’t turn out the way I assumed they would when I was younger, and at some point you notice that’s probably how it’s going to be, there's something very Jungian in that. 

1. There is a very specific kind of embarrassment in these songs, still wanting something after you’ve reached an age where you’re supposed to have accepted that you won’t get it. How much of that tension is autobiographical, and how much is you observing the people and world around you?

Michael Nestor: Mostly autobiographical. I’ve been in bands for about thirty years. Pupa’s Window, Lowell, The Seldon Plan, I ran a label called The Beechfields, and now this. A couple of those got close to something and yet none of them really got there. It's that push pull where you are so close to shore but too far away to make it before drowning where all my songs live...whether I was in my 20's or 40's. It's remarkably consistent through my life and art. I live the life of the person who is overlooked, not invited, not called back, on the outside looking in. It's kind of been this way for me my whole life, like there is something intrinsic to me that ignites that cycle. You’d think by now that would stop bothering me, and mostly it does, but it comes back at odd times, usually when you see someone you came up with doing well. I do see it in friends too, in music and outside of it. People who were told they were promising a long time ago and are still kind of waiting for that promise to happen. No one is supposed to admit any of this out loud. 

1. The line “everything is broken, we’re alright” feels almost like the thesis of the record. Was that something you recognized as central immediately, or did the meaning of that line become clearer once the rest of the album took shape?

Michael Nestor: It got clearer later. That line was in “Afterimage” early and I did know it was aligned with the mood and the songs on this record. It sounded right with the melody and fit the zeitgeist as I perceived it. Once the record was sequenced it was obvious that it was kind of the whole point, which is partly why “Afterimage” ended up opening the album.

1. You’ve described The Accelerationists as confronting a loud world head-on, while A Quiet Condition feels like the aftermath of that noise. Was that shift deliberate? Did you want this record to feel smaller, more isolated, or more internal than the previous one?

Michael Nestor: Some of both. The Accelerationists was loud and pretty angry. It did well with press and college radio for a short time and then more or less disappeared online. Our Instagram reach fell off right after it came out, and I think the title had something to do with that as I have mentioned. The title itself was flagged by AI as conforming with hate speech because the title references right wing dogma. Ironically, the reason I titled it that was because the record was calling out the right wing technocratic oligarchy who I went to college with and read Ayn Rand right beside. Whereas I saw The Fountainhead as a utopian fantasy in the same lane as communism or any "ism" these folks took it as something real. I had to call that out. The algorithm punished the band for it.  I came out of that cycle tired, and what I wrote next was quieter and exhausted with the whole dumpster fire things are devolving into in some sectors of western culture. I never sat down and decided to make a smaller record. Joe, who was the amazing bassist on that record and filled out the live show, also went back to his main band last fall, so it’s just Roger and me now, and I think having two people in the room instead of three made it more inward without us trying.

1. The guitar work is huge and layered, but the songs don’t necessarily feel huge. How do you decide when a guitar part should add another layer of emotion and when it would simply be getting in the way?

Michael Nestor: Mostly by ear, and by cutting things. I usually track more guitars than I need and then pull parts until something feels missing. Frank at Waterford Digital is good at telling me when a part isn’t doing anything. A lot of the layering on this one happened in my basement after the studio sessions, where I could try things without watching the clock. I want the songs to live in the space between the notes and if that space becomes too filled with stuff, I know pretty immediately. I think I am just trying to make modern indie rock versions of Acetone and Karate records at this point, haha. 

1. Your vocals are often buried inside the guitars and atmosphere rather than placed completely in front of the listener. What does that distance allow you to do emotionally that a more traditional vocal presentation wouldn’t?

Michael Nestor: For me it’s about getting everything to flow together as one uniform movement. I treat the voice as another instrument in the mix, which is how I think it’s meant to work in this kind of music, rather than something sitting on top of the band. Pretty much all of my favorite mixes do this. Dosser, one of my favorite current Baltimore bands, does the same thing. The vocal is part of the texture, and the songs feel more like one piece because of it. Part of it is that some of these lyrics are pretty direct, and if they were right up front it would feel like I was giving a speech. Further back, they’re there if you want them but they are not saying, "hey look at me, look at how profound I am." 

1. The titles themselves seem to deteriorate as the album progresses, “Futr,” “Lament (96 Mx),” “Pernod (Ze Mx).” What do those altered titles mean to you, and why was it important to leave those imperfections visible, why the abbreviations and missing vowels?

Michael Nestor: I left them because that’s what the files were called, and renaming them felt wrong for this record. The second half is rougher than the first, and the titles show that a little. The idea was to kind of have a deteriorating line of thought, becoming more and more disorganized as you go to Pernod (Ze Mx) then almost like a last gasp of life, you get a normal song at the end. In behaviorism, its called an extinction burst. 

1. There’s a recurring feeling throughout the record of people becoming signals, names, profiles, or pieces of information that can simply disappear from somebody else’s attention. Has social media changed the way you think about being a musician, or about what it means to remain visible after you’ve been doing this for years?

Michael Nestor: Yeah. When I started, you got heard through radio, zines, and playing out a lot. Now it depends on whether an app decides to show your post to people who already follow you. We still mail CDs to college and community stations because the people there actually listen (I think). Instagram is mostly so bookers can see we’re active, its all too damn performative in a pick me sort of way that just is antithetical to my value system. But we try to do our best. A lot of the record is about that feeling of becoming a name people scroll past, which we generally are. It's hard to ignore that this is our reality. Some may say that's because our music can't compete and it's not compelling enough to garner attention. I've had people message me that it's because I'm older and age means that my music is stale and their friends' band is doing great so just stop complaining about it and deal with not being very good. I have no clue how to reply in a world like that other than to tackle it head on. 

1. After more than a decade as Underlined Passages, what parts of being in a band have become easier, and what parts have actually become stranger or more difficult with age?

Michael Nestor: Roger and I have been at this long enough that we don’t talk much about parts anymore. He hears something and plays it. Scheduling is easier with two people, and so are decisions. The stranger part is not really knowing who the audience is now. When I was younger I could fill a 300 capacity room on a week’s notice with word of mouth, a few flyers, and some promised beers. That doesn’t work anymore because our audience is so scattered, and I’m still figuring out what does.

1. “Bright Eyes” closes the record without really resolving anything. Was it important to leave the listener in that unresolved place, and what do you think the band understands differently now than it did when Underlined Passages first started?

Michael Nestor: Yes. The whole record is about things that don’t resolve, so ending on a big payoff would have undercut everything before it. “Bright Eyes” ends in disintegration the same way I see the moment we are in now ending. I wanted it to remind people that this is all transient and unfinished. You could go full nihilism with that, but I think the magic is existing in spite of knowing it’s all meaningless. The deal is that nobody is coming to tell you it was worth it, so you decide that for yourself. When we started in 2014, I judged every record from this band on whether it was art, whether it said something profound and connected with people. I still do. What I’ve let go of is the idea that it also had to lead somewhere: bigger rooms, longer tours, more of this, more of that. The music business stopped caring about bands like us a long time ago. I either missed the memo or read it and kept going. Probably both.

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