As Everything Unfolds have just chronicled the most painful chapter of their lives. The devastation following the death of drummer Jamie Gowers in August 2024 was always bound to filter into their music – particularly when vocalist Charlie Rolfe was grieving the loss of someone who was both her bandmate and her partner. As such, their third album DID YOU ASK TO BE SET FREE? represents a blunt-force purging of emotion, but the pain they express is a prism of complex thoughts, feelings and experiences that might not necessarily be all tied to a singular event. Regardless of the biography, the band have harnessed it all for powerful means.
Along the way, they’re navigating a sea of confusion, anger and sorrow. Opener DENIAL’s portrait someone blind to their own emotional destructiveness practically burns with anguish, particularly through Charlie’s screams of, ‘I know you enjoy watching me bleed / In your self-destructive misery.’ Amid the swerving melodies of POINT OF VIEW, they deepen that sentiment to explore the feelings of the bystanders whose perspective gets thrown aside as someone they love gets absorbed into their own suffering.
CUT THE LIES, meanwhile, channels the frustration of betrayal into a fizzing four-to-the-floor banger unlike anything AEU has ever attempted before, while WHAT YOU WANTED’s chainsaw riffing from the school of Spiritbox is matched in heaviness by a razor-throated guest turn from Bury Tomorrow’s Dani Winter-Bates.