It feels like treading water. Like you’re at the starting line of a marathon, already out of breath. Like spiraling, but you can’t tell if you’re headed up or down. Like all your stupid little songs are all starting to sound the same.

This is what it feels like to be lost according to Origami Angel, the DC rock duo whose discography over the past eight years has largely focused on what brings folks together. “I’m too scared to be alone,” guitarist/vocalist Ryland Heagy proclaimed on their 2018 EP Doing The Most; since then, he and bandmate Pat Doherty have written sincere skate-punk anthems about watching cartoons and eating fast food next to friends and crushes, with healthy doses of gang vocals at nearly every turn to reflect a world that feels anything but lonely.

More Modern Baseball than American Football, Origami Angel were never all that bummed about the summer ending, so to speak – they were too busy trying to find a way to make the good times last forever. But your head can only stay in the clouds for so long before the altitude gets to you.

And so we arrive at Origami Angel’s third full-length album Feeling Not Found, out this Friday. It’s the band’s most biting and demanding record to date, using their cathartic brand of maximalist, emo-inflicted pop-punk to convey their woes about being cogs in the digital machine. They recorded the album with alt rock-inclined studio vet Will Yip, and along with bands like fellow Yip acolytes glass beach, Origami Angel are among a small, recent crop of bands who nod to 2000s metalcore without watering down their unadulterated DIY roots. Brash, sharp, and innovative, Feeling Not Found is an exemplary portrait of the state of pop-punk in 2024.

Heagy and Doherty began working on the material that would eventually comprise the record at least five years ago, and its result feels both liberated and deeply conisdered; its narrators have seen the explosion of TikTok, the rise and fall of Instagram, the hellscape of Twitter/X through multiple election cycles. Ever the fans of wordplay, even the title Origami Angel chose for the album almost acts as a double entendre; not only evoking a blasé attitude towards an unknown world, but the cold sensation of being unknowable.

In the three years since their last proper full-length, their inside-joke-riddled double-album GAMI GANG, Heagy began to feel lost: “Everything [in my life] felt very random and unstable,” he’s said. With that in mind, Feeling Not Found seems to ask: Is anything in our everyday lives more random or unstable than modern technology? The album underscores the effects of a life spent online, where validation more often than not comes through a screen, physical media feels nearly obsolete, and Find My Friends becomes one of the most earnest form of human connection.

Heagy questions the true value of parasocial relationships and follower count on the dizzying “Underneath My Skin”: “It’s meaningless to think that you know someone, you really don’t/ Just ‘cause you’ve got mutual friends/ Opinions and pictures of them.” But he’s played the game, too, and knows that aspiring to “blowing up” isn’t so illogical when it means raking in six figures instead of pennies. On “Sixth Cents (Get It?),” Heagy analyzes the modern-day music biz, where the responsibility of marketing becomes a full additional hustle: “You’re gonna have to turn blood, sweat, and tears into dollar signs,” he argues with a snarl over breakneck drums and piercing riffs. Meanwhile, atop the hefty guitars of “Viral,” Heagy begs: “Tell me something good, I wanna smile one more time/ Tell me I’ll be safe from the virus in my mind.” You get the sense that he isn’t pleading to another person, but to social media itself to absolve the worries those platforms catalyzed.

But what keeps Feeling Not Found from slipping into overt self-pity is Origami Angel’s ability to reflect on themselves. In January 2023, Heagy’s cousin – another musician who, incidentally, had previously worked with Yip – passed away. The somber, drumless album opener “Lost Signal” is a snapshot of grief, as Heagy lets the YouTube autoplay queue fill in the newly-emptied space. It’s not the type of song you’d expect from an Origami Angel album, much less the first song. But it imbues Feeling Not Found with a much-needed sense of humanness amid the glitched-up matrix of its existential dread. The internet has a way of convincing us we’re at a deficit in every aspect of life – relationships, money, the things we wear and do. It might be inescapable at this point, but Feeling Not Found is a lesson in seeking true fulfillment regardless. “All this time I wasted struggling fighting for things that I thought that I lacked/ Now I’m taking that back!” Heagy proclaims on “Dirty Mirror Selfie.” It sounds like he’s well on his way already.

Feeling Not Found is out 9/27 via Counter Intuitive.





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