Quicksand & Bane with Soul Blind

Interiors is Quicksand’s best album yet. It sounds like nothing else you are going to hear this year. It arrives deliberately unannounced, two decades after the pioneering post-hardcore quartet’s last album. Made completely on the band’s own terms, Interiors has a power, strength and subtlety that will likely stun you. There are no wasted notes, no flab, and no excess whatsoever. It is absolutely perfect. “This struck a chord, where we felt this is actually something that could represent us now,” says bassist Sergio Vega. “It doesn’t sound like a third album a couple of decades later. It’s a piece of work that we really, really can back.” That may be an understatement: Interiors is breathtaking in its surging, sculptured sonic attack, a welcome reminder that the band’s longtime status as musical innovators is not undeserved. To make the record, the band first had to return to the beginning—to the purity of why Quicksand started making music in the first place. In the process, they made a great record that speaks to their past—but, more essentially, to their present and future. “First we went out and made the record we wanted to make, with the person we wanted to make it with,” says drummer Alan Cage. “Then we went with a finished product and said ‘OK, who’s going to put this thing out?’ Of course we want to share it, have people listen to it, and create their own relationship with it--but at the core, it is our thing. “I think we landed in a perfect place to do that with epitaph.” “When we first became a band, that’s what we did with making our EP. We put together $1500 and recorded the songs, because no one knew or cared about what we were doing, except for us. We took the same approach with Interiors.” And of course, so much has changed since then. “I’m thrilled to be listening back to a record that we made with our own money, on our own schedule and creative terms,” says Quicksand front man/guitarist Walter Schreifels. “While it was definitely important for us…