My Fictions - 'Touch of Glass'

MY FICTIONS are breaking through with TOUCH OF GLASS, their new full-length album and first release on Massachusetts-based metal tastemaker 1126 Records. Throughout over ten years as a band, My Fictions has specialized in making cathartic music. “I feel compelled to pull from my lowest moments to make something that matches the intensity of the songs,” vocalist Bryan Carifio remarks on the process of lyric-writing. That pain-staking process has resulted in the band’s most intense collection of songs to date – Touch of Glass is a record designed to devastate. 

My Fictions began around the Boston-area in the distant memory of the early 2010s. The band cut their teeth making noise in basement venues with ridiculous names that have been long since shut down & rented to more responsible tenants. A handful of EPs and split releases honing in on the band’s aggressive & atmospheric sound preceded their 2014 full-length Stranger Songs. Their debut album served as the best summation-to-date of what has become the My Fictions formula: songs must be lyrically dense, sonically pummeling, and emotionally tolling.

After years of inactivity, a revitalized version of the band returned in 2021 with a six-song comeback EP. Time Immemorial brought new, heavier elements into the My Fictions sound while retaining the strange & suffocating undercurrent of earlier offerings. They followed suit by hitting the road with metalcore legends Overcast and Providence-based split partners Dreamwell on separate runs, then carried this energy into Connecticut’s Silver Bullet Studios late last year to work for the first time with album engineer and producer Chris Teti (The World is a Beautiful Place & I am No Longer Afraid to Die, Fiddlehead). 

With the band split over two states, the writing process for Touch of Glass was a long one. Over two years guitarist Tyler Bradley, drummer Seamus Menihane and newcomer Michael Russo on bass would meet on a weekly basis to write & send ideas to Carifio, who was living in Brooklyn & trying desperately to contribute to the special songwriting happening a few hours away. “I would just buy notebooks and listen on repeat, scribbling ideas endlessly”, says Carifio. Inspired by records like Slipknot’s Iowa, Alice in Chains’ Dirt and Converge’s No Heroes, the aim was always to create an album-long sense of dread with the songs they were building together from a distance, even if it took months to take shape.

“New Face” sets a furious tone to start off the album. A rampaging reflection on the impossibility of starting over that deteriorates mid-song into a droning, ambient instrumental break, closed out with a quote from Cormac McCarthy’s play The Sunset Limited – “Who would want this nightmare, but for fear of the next?” An immediate segue into the chaotic single Dreams of Escape puts this quote into a fitting context – jagged blast beats & manic start-stop guitar riffs are only parts of the unnerving atmosphere that My Fictions builds like an anxiety dream that carries over the album’s ten songs.

The next single “Cold Streak” comes up next, which according to Bradley is “as close to a fun song as we've ever written”. The song’s mid-tempo groove is matched by an eerie guitar riff reminiscent of bands like mewithoutYou or Fear Before, building a tense atmosphere until the song’s chaotic breakdown. What follows is title track “Touch of Glass,” a slow and somber midway point on the album that brings the album’s thematic purpose into focus - trying to reshape shattered bits of something broken into a workable whole is often both a fragile and futile exercise.

The record’s latter half is packed with its most unrelenting songs, including the scathing breakdown that ends “Selfish Wish” and “Disguise” – a metal-influenced epic that uses self-immolation as a metaphor for correcting past mistakes – “can I build an effigy / made from the worst in me?”, asks Carifio in the song’s scream-along bridge. This all builds up to album ender “Touch of Glass ii,” the band’s heaviest song ever which acts as a dreadful statement of purpose and point of the closure to the album. A disorienting guitar lead haunts over the drum & bass onslaught as the album’s final lyrics are screamed into the abyss -  “My futures all collapse / no way of turning back / through the glass”. It’s the fitting conclusion that comes from an album ten years in the making -  something formed by the most intense, driven and potentially distressing iteration of My Fictions yet.