One of these days, a piece I wrote about The Narrator will appear on the Death + Taxes website. It was initially written around the time of their second album, All That to the Wall, which now looks like it’s also going to be their final album. And as far as bands I’m fond of, both musically and as human beings, this is a fucking shame. The albums are, I’d say, terrific — All That to the Wall in particular. All That to the Wall breaks my heart whenever I listen to it, to be honest, from the offbeat Dylan cover to the emotionally raw closing moments of “A Decade in Kentucky” and “Chocolate Windchimes”. It’s an album I haven’t gotten tired of in a year of listening to it; each listen reveals a few more nuances. It moves like a punk rock record and develops like something else; interviewing them a year or so ago found Jesse Woghin invoking Kurt Vonnegut and George Saunders, and it’s that kind of sensibility — you laugh and you find yourself caught up in how well it flows along, and suddenly there’s something so emotionally true, so brutally honest, that you can’t look away.

The last time the Narrator played New York, the show ended with most of Mannequin Men and Oxford Collapse on stage, instruments strewn everywhere, and some bearded dude in the second row shouting, “That was amazing! That was amazing! That was fucking amazing!” again and again. They could deliver ragged, staggering sets and they could deliver pinpoint, precise sets, and their songs worked in both.

There are certain records, punk rock and arising from punk rock, that I listened to in my teens and early twenties that I can listen to and appreciate. Nothing Feels Good, for one. That’s a record that broke my heart at twenty, and can still break it at thirty-one. All That to the Wall has that same timelessness: you can pump your fist along with it and lose yourself in it and it feels amazing, but there’s something a lot more resonant there as well. I can’t say for sure whether I would have dug The Narrator at twenty; they weren’t a band then. But they were a band when I was thirty, and twenty-nine, and thirty-one, and I’m grateful for that.