156/Silence

Pittsburgh, 2015, and a band that kept replacing itself

156/Silence began in Pittsburgh in 2015, and the group touring Europe this month shares only part of its make-up with the one that put out the EP Unrequited, Unrefuted, and Undeniably – I'm Alone that November. Mike Ernst sang on those early recordings, on the debut album And Everything Was Beautiful in July 2016, and on the Karma EP in May 2017. He stopped fronting the band in 2017; Jack Murray took over on vocals, and Ernst later returned to the line-up on bass and backing vocals, which is where he sits now.

By 2018 the roster had turned over almost entirely, and Undercover Scumbag, released that September, is where most listeners pick the band up. It is a hardcore record with metallic edges rather than the atmospheric metalcore they play today. The distance between that album and the current material is wide enough that the band's own history reads as a sequence of rebuilds rather than a straight line, and the title track still turns up in the live set as a reminder of the earlier version.

Four albums of narrowing focus

Irrational Pull arrived in June 2020 and Narrative in September 2022, by which point the writing had grown more technical and more deliberately unpleasant in texture. The shift that mattered commercially came with People Watching on 13 September 2024, the record where the band moved properly towards metalcore and away from the hardcore framing of the earlier releases. Murray has since described it as the album that introduced sung choruses into the band's vocabulary.

People Watching also introduced Phillip, the figure on its sleeve. The artwork was an unfinished piece the band decided to keep as it was, and it split opinion among listeners; the character has since returned in the artwork and the videos for the new album, which gives the two records an unusually direct visual link. Guitarist Jimmy Howell's line about nothing ever being off the table has become the band's working principle, and reviewers have started testing the new material against it.

A death, and a new label

Bassist Lukas Booker died unexpectedly in March 2025. The band committed to finishing the tour they were booked on at the time, supporting Silent Planet and Invent Animate, rather than pulling the dates. The current five-piece — Murray, Howell, Ryan Wilkinson on guitar, Ernst on bass and Kyle O'Connell on drums — is the configuration that carried the band through the rest of that year.

In October 2025 they signed to Pure Noise Records, having previously released through SharpTone. The label describes them as atmospheric metalcore, which is a fair reading of where the sound has landed, and credits the growth in their standing to touring with acts including The Devil Wears Prada and Chiodos rather than to any single breakout track.

From A Distance, and what Josh Schroeder did to it

From A Distance came out on 4 September 2026, the sixth album and the first for Pure Noise. Josh Schroeder, whose credits include King 810 and Lorna Shore, produced it; Murray has said Schroeder created a warm working environment while giving genuinely honest feedback on the material. The stated reference points are survival-horror game soundtracks — Resident Evil and Silent Hill — alongside industrial and darkwave textures, and the result keeps the spooky atmosphere of People Watching while making it dreamier and more cinematic. Murray's account of the process is that the band deliberately avoided repeating the chorus formula of the previous album and leant instead into soundscapes and tighter structure.

Three guests appear. Mike Hranica of The Devil Wears Prada, whom Murray calls a hometown hero, screams on Cannon Fodder; Alex Reade of Make Them Suffer features on the title track; and Tony Castrati of Crippling Alcoholism appears on Collateral. No Arms was the first single, released alongside the album announcement in June 2026 and described by the band as being about having no way to protect yourself or what belongs to you. Proxy Idols followed.

Reviews have been positive but not uniformly so. Writing for The Soundboard, Luke Nuttall rated the experimentation as real rather than claimed, singling out Collateral for its mix of factory-floor machinery, nu-metal and darkwave, and Cannon Fodder for the most screaming Hranica has done in recent memory. He also found the iced-over production uncanny in a way the band has not fully mastered, called the album slow to reward repeated listening, and judged Murray's clean singing underdeveloped. Away From Life was warmer, flagging No Arms, Collateral, Cannon Fodder and Phoenix Dies, and arguing the record expands their standing as one of the less predictable acts in heavy music.

Autumn 2026: the densest run they have done

The touring year has been close to continuous. They played Inkcarceration at the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield on 18 July, then joined Chiodos, sace6 and Calva Louise on the It's Not You, It's Me North American run from 3 August, taking in Boise, Portland, Spokane, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, St Paul, Green Bay, Asheville and Nashville. Louder Than Life followed on 20 September.

Their own headline run, the From A Distance tour, opened at the Palladium Upstairs in Worcester, Massachusetts on 9 September with Aviana, Heavensgate and Fromjoy in support, and ran through the start of October. They crossed to Europe for a co-headline trek with The Devil Wears Prada and Novelists, announced on 16 April 2026, with the grunge band Oversize opening every date. It began at Backstage Werk in Munich on 7 October and takes in Wiesbaden, Hamburg, Eindhoven, Vienna, Leipzig, Prague, Cologne, Antwerp and Paris, where Novelists drop off, before five UK dates: Bristol Electric on 20 October, Project House in Leeds on 21 October, Brixton Electric in London on 23 October, New Century Hall in Manchester on 24 October and the Institute in Birmingham on 25 October.

Murray's description of how the band operates has not softened with the bigger rooms: weekly practice, accepting any tour offered, and writing without pause when they are home. He frames the whole operation around the word grit, and has been openly dismissive of chasing streaming metrics as a substitute for that.

The set, and how it is built

As headliners they play long. At the Worcester show on 9 September the set ran to 19 songs, bookended by the title track and closing on Character Development (Cold Start), with Goodbye Horses, Control Burns, No Arms, Product Placement, Target Acquired, Collateral, Proxy Idols, Secret Room and Undercover Scumbag along the way — roughly half of it drawn from the new record, the rest reaching back as far as 2018. Heavensgate played seven songs and Fromjoy five on the same bill, which left the headline slot with most of the night.

The European and UK dates are a different proposition. Sharing a bill with The Devil Wears Prada and Novelists compresses the set to a support-length run, which in practice means the From A Distance material plus the two or three older songs that still get the loudest response. Reviewers covering their supporting slots in September noted them ending strongly rather than being swallowed by the headliner.