Hello once again, dedicated monthly readers. The spring semester has a funny way of messing around with your feelings. You transition from the cold winter into the sunny spring, but that doesn’t always translate to how you’re feeling. For this reason, I’m dedicating this month’s music review to music tinged with a malaise that fits this ‘special’ time of the year, for me at least. I’ll be discussing Slow Quit and their new split release album.
Slow Quit is a Boston-based underground band that sits at the crossroads of shoegaze, noise rock, doom, and hardcore. That’s a fancy way of saying this band transitions from sounding dreamy and soft to loud and heavy. It’s a kind of genre collision that feels less like fusion and more like controlled collapse. They self-identify as “knucklescraper-gaze,” a phrase that perfectly captures their aesthetic: part dreamy haze, part blunt-force trauma.
Formed in the early 2020s, the group emerged out of Boston’s dense DIY ecosystem—particularly spaces like Allston, a long-standing hub for experimental and underground music scenes. Their early recordings were literally built in that environment, tracked live in a small rental practice space, reinforcing their raw, unfiltered ethos.
Slow Quit consists of Nicholas Watter on guitar and vocals, Lauren Crosser on drums and vocals, Adam Straus on guitar and synth, and Jeff Carroll on bass guitar. This lineup is key to their sound: dual guitars create dense walls of texture, while synth elements subtly thicken the atmosphere rather than dominate it. Vocals are often submerged, functioning more like another instrument than a narrative focal point.
If you want to map the lineage of the band’s sound, here’s one way to look at it. They live somewhere between a shoegaze revival (bands such as Nothing, Whitelands), noise rock (early-Sonic Youth), and modern doomgaze hybrids (Planning for Burial, Cloakroom). If that doesn’t excite you, that’s completely OK. Most of this music is pretty depressing in sound.
We live in exciting times. As of March 31st (the day this article was written and submitted for review), the Slow Quit and Helens split album was released on Bandcamp. It comes in a digital format, and for the hardcore collectors, a tape format. My review is going to focus on the Slow Quit portion of this release (only because this article is about them) but just know that Helens is also a deeply entertaining band in a similar sound realm.
The Slow Quit side of this split is easily enough for me to spend my money on this release. The band has this magical way of taking upbeat sounding riffs (particularly guitar riffs) and dredging them with downbeat, reverb-y vocals and synth work. The result is this nostalgic experience for me because it reminds me of hearing Nirvana’s more downtrodden work (particularly deep cuts from the With the Lights Out compilation). I honestly love the added reverb on the vocal tracks and how buried they sound. It just gives that extra depth to the sound the band is trying to achieve. The track Terrain of Struggle is my favorite track on their 3-track side of this split. It gives me everything both a fan of indie music and metal music typically enjoy. The 1:40-2:13 segment of this track is that indie, dreamy shoegaze sound mentioned above. Those who haven’t found their way to the heavy side of music will appreciate this. Onwards into the track, 2:15 and on, it turns into this doom metal guitar segment that really reminds me of bands such as Pallbearer.
Honestly, Slow Quit is a cool find during my typical Bandcamp excursions when I’m looking for new music. Digitally, this release is five dollars. Physically, it’s only $10.50. Give this band your hard-earned cash, they deserve it. Five stars.
Stream/Buy it here: https://slowquit.bandcamp.com/album/split
