Gouge Away songs can feel like the sonic embodiment of a panic attack. Their 2016 debut , Dies blazes with pulverizing hardcore, Christina Michelle screaming at the top of her lungs about animal cruelty while caustic guitars and hyper-speed drumming conjure a discordant whirlwind of only minute-long blasts. Its follow-up, 2018’s Burnt Sugar, instantly set them apart from their clamorous peers. The album’s sound ricochets between brooding grunge and more clean-cut attacks of hardcore; the screeching opener “Only Friend” is an urgent riot, while the unsettling “Ghost” takes its time unfurling into beautiful mayhem. Instead of focusing on social issues, the lyrics turn inward, relaying episodes of dissociation, paranoia, and feeling like drowning, the music ringing with the same intensity as the garbled words.

After Burnt Sugar, the Fort Lauderdale band — consisting of Michelle on vocals, Thomas Cantwell on drums, Mick Ford on guitar, Dylan Downey also on guitar, and Tyler Forsythe on bass — went on hiatus for a while. They began writing their third album Deep Sage in 2019, but the pandemic put a pause on the whole process.

“I was so jealous when other people were still showing that they were writing and putting out new songs and they felt like the most creative ever because they had all this time on their hands,” Michelle explains over Zoom the week before the Deep Sage release. “It was way more devastating to us, and discouraging when you see everyone else was able to adapt.”

“We definitely feed off of each other’s energy being in the same room together,” she adds. Now, Gouge Away are spread out across the map; Michelle and Cantwell (who she refers to as Tommy) reside in Portland, two members are still in Fort Lauderdale, and another is in Atlanta. Last year, they reunited at a Militarie Gun gig in Portland. “Gouge Away is a band that started expanding their sound past the typical boundaries of hardcore, which was very inspiring to me when I started Militarie Gun,” Ian Shelton tells us over email, “so when they said they all were in Portland working on music I had to ask them to come up and play a song or two. It made the show so special and made me so excited for the new record.”

That record is finally here. Deep Sage was recorded live, with the band playing while Michelle sang in a vocal booth. Burnt Sugar was recorded and mixed by Jack Shirley and produced by Touché Amoré’s Jeremy Bolm; this one was done entirely with Shirley. It was first previewed with last year’s “Idealized,” a track that flexes their dynamics, drifting between quiet and chaotic. The album is speckled with these moments of sprawling, haunted grunge. The hardcore madness shines through on the horror movie-esque epic “The Sharpening” and the rambunctious anthem “Spaced Out.” The group also flirts with shoegaze on “Dallas,” which feels like an inevitable evolution (especially since Burnt Sugar’s “Fed Up” seems to take direct influence from Swirles’ “Park The Car By The Side Of The Road“).

This will definitely spark some “Gouge Away is not real hardcore” complaints, a common result of any hardcore band expanding their palette. “I feel like people are more precious about sticking to a genre or sticking into some kind of box,” Michelle says about the hardcore world, “whereas I feel like it’s okay to do different things in other areas of music to show your different influences.”

“One of the most interesting things to see is when people are upset that we’re influenced by the ’90s,” she adds. “How is it possible to not be influenced by that?” Michelle credits her mom’s interest in grunge for being the reason she got into music. Though Gouge Away’s stuff is not particularly palatable, her mom does rock with it: “She’s always reminding me of how tough and abrasive her taste is compared to other people,” Michelle says.

Michelle walked us through every track on Deep Sage; check out the conversation below.

1. “Stuck In A Dream”

CHRISTINA MICHELLE: It’s a song that meant a lot to me when I wrote the lyrics, but it’s kind of a funny topic to speak on. I never want to give the impression that I hate touring and don’t appreciate everything we get to do. But it was a song I wrote in 2019 after two years straight of touring very hard, very aggressively, having no space for my own mental health and no boundaries at all, no chance to take care of myself and how being on tour in that state is the last place that’s good for that. It’s just a song about how day-to-day, when you’re in a bad mental state, touring can feel the same in and out. It’s a hard thing to talk about in any sort of negative way because people view it as a dream that everybody wants. That’s basically what led to the whole theme of being stuck in this dream and wanting a break from it sometimes.

My opinion on a lot of things has changed since taking a long break. Originally the lyrics at the end were “Selfishly want to wake up,” because I’ve felt like it was selfish to feel this way, that I don’t just feel 100% grateful all the time. But I changed it right before recording to “God, I just want to wake up,” because it’s really not selfish to have any kind of feeling.

2. “Maybe Blue”

MICHELLE: I wrote the lyrics to this while I was on tour with Nothing. I played bass with them for a couple of years. It was a unique situation where Tommy and I are together and we live together, but when we decided to move to Portland from Florida, we created this life that was perfect. Then I got asked to tour with Nothing and Tommy got asked to tour with Angel Du$t, and we both had to go our separate ways for a long time. It was a lot of extensive touring and it was the first time we were going to be apart for so long. I wrote the lyrics to this song while I was on tour with Nothing and very sad and missing Tommy and missing this perfect life I had at home.

I had no idea that this was going to become a Gouge Away song either. The guys in Nothing listen to a lot of old country singer-songwriter type of stuff, like Townes Van Zandt and Lucinda Williams. That was my first time really being exposed to that type of thing so deeply. I started writing lyrics that were more like storytelling and more in my feels because of that. It’s just about being afraid that we’re gonna go these separate ways and then grow apart and never have this perfect home life again because of new experiences.

I imagine it’s just a very unpredictable lifestyle, not knowing when the next tour will be.

MICHELLE: Yeah. I would be doing basically 12 weeks straight with Nothing, just getting to the end of that. I love Nothing and had so much fun, but it was the home life that I missed. But I’d be counting down the days to get home and then five days before that, Tommy’s like, “I’m gonna do another tour.” It’s just like, when are we gonna get back to what we know?

3. “Idealized”

Why did you pick this as your comeback song?

MICHELLE: No thought went into it at all. I feel like if we wanted to put out a strategic single, we probably would have picked something a little more predictable. But “Idealized” was just a song that we had demoed in early 2020. And we were working on for a couple of years before that. It was just a song that we all loved for a very long time. We just couldn’t wait to share it.

This one was written in a Florida storage unit?

MICHELLE: Our practice space in Orlando was literally this hot storage unit. We just set up a practice space, and they let us stay there all hours of the night. It kind of worked out for them because they saw bands being there as free security because they’re like, “No one’s gonna mess with this place if all these people around.”

Did you have air conditioning?

MICHELLE: Yeah, but it’s Florida. It didn’t help very much.

4. “Deep Sage”

I’m curious about what “deep sage” means.

MICHELLE: Deep sage refers to the unknown, I guess the future. I wrote these lyrics the first week that I moved to Portland. It was 2021 and everything was so confusing — the world news is so devastating and scary and upsetting. The future of our world and the climate is so scary, and everything is always overwhelming. I feel like I carry that with me everywhere and it’s so heavy. The first week of moving to Portland, I went to this secret beach that no one was at and I was just like, this place is so beautiful. The world is actually so gorgeous. Why can’t we just enjoy it? Why are there so many things in the way of that? It’s a song about going back and forth between really wanting to enjoy the world for all the beauty that’s there, but being constantly distracted by all of the problems.

I saw that Burnt Sugar was titled because the smell of burnt sugar could be grounding for you. Deep sage feels kind of similar to that.

MICHELLE: Someone else just asked me the same thing. There was no intention for that relation, but I totally relate to that now.

Deep sage feels like a comforting thing.

MICHELLE: Yeah. I guess with this struggle of the unknown being very scary, you could find a way to make it kind of comforting. I feel like sometimes not knowing the meaning of life and not knowing what the future is going to hold is almost liberating in a way. Because there’s no expectations to live up to.

Yeah. It’s funny that those things cause so much stress, because if we did have the answers, what would we do with them?

MICHELLE: Yeah, definitely.

The lyrics of the song are very similar to ideas on the song “Dallas” — just the struggle to be present. Does making music helps you feel present?

MICHELLE: I think it does. After having a break from being in that constant grind, after spending so much time touring with other bands and having other jobs and having to spend my attention elsewhere, coming back to writing for Gouge Away — it made me realize that I work harder on this than anything in my life. It’s kind of interesting. I don’t know how that’s not valuable to society in an economic way.

I was going to say — I hope it’s rewarding, though it’s probably the least financially rewarding.

MICHELLE: Yeah, it is the least financially rewarding thing, but it’s the thing that gives us the most purpose and the most reason to continue.

5. “A Welcome Change”

MICHELLE: Another song about trying to be present. I love this song too, because, musically, what the guys did, it feels so comforting to me. It feels like a big comfy blanket whenever I listen to this song. It’s another very meta song about being in a band. I wrote the lyrics in 2019, when I was very burnt out. I feel like I had nothing left to write about or nothing left to pull from. I was pretty tired of being depressed all the time. It’s about being so emotionally exhausted that there is nothing left to pull from, for lyric-writing. But then at the same time, it’s almost nice. It’s not productive for writing lyrics, but it’s nice for me that maybe I’ve worn all of that out, or that I’ve worn all the depression out at this point in writing and thinking about it. And it’s a nice change.

I’m just making this connection now and it’s so weird to put in a Stereogum article, but it almost makes me think of Ariana Grande’s “No Tears Left To Cry.” It’s like you’ve gotten all the feelings out, all the emotions out that there’s just nothing left. That might be sad, but it’s also like, thank god.

There’s a line: “It isn’t like me to be still.” Have you always had this restlessness, and why do you think you deal with that?

MICHELLE: I’m like 100% restless and anxious and always have to be doing things. It’s definitely from how I was brought up — to just be an overachiever and a perfectionist. I always think now how when I was young, my time was divided between all these things. Being a straight-A student, doing after school activities, being a competitive dancer, having a job, taking drum lessons. Now, as an adult, I’m like, how on earth was that possible? I can do one major task a day and I’m done mentally.

6. “Overwatering”

MICHELLE: My favorite thing about this song is that when I originally wrote it, before the pandemic, I was still in that mentality of writing to another person, directed at another person and kind of putting blame on this other figure. Then, closer to recording, I flipped the whole song’s meaning so it’d be more about my own responsibility in situations. It came from spending time in therapy and having space to work on myself and realizing that a lot of my problems didn’t come from other people taking advantage of me necessarily, but from my own lack of boundaries, and how loving something too much and being obsessive with something can be actually very detrimental to your relationship with that thing.

7. “No Release”

MICHELLE: This is one that the guys wrote musically so long ago, and I struggled for the longest time to write lyrics to it. The phrasings musically are so short and quick and I like to write having more space. It was a very frustrating and impossible song to write to. But then I leaned into that theme of claustrophobia, and the whole song took that theme of anxiety in claustrophobia. I was hospitalized when I was younger, a lot in high school, and that’s where I became a claustrophobic person. That will show up in a lot of situations. I just leaned into trying to express that feeling. I feel like because the song is very tense, it adds to that anxious feeling.

8. “The Sharpening”

This is a pretty gnarly song. It starts with this image of a pencil, followed by you being stabbed with the pencil.

MICHELLE: This one, I was not very sure about it, lyrically speaking. I even went to the guys during practice one day, and I was like, “I feel very silly telling you what the lyrics are, but I’m going to tell you them so you can tell me if this is so stupid.” But they’re going like, “No, whatever, be a little silly. That’s fine. Nirvana said, ‘My mosquito, my libido,’ like you’re good.” I felt very silly about the pencil opening line, but I really like the whole story of the song. So I was just like, whatever, just own it.

This was the first time I tried to do something like this vocally, where in the same sentence it goes from talking to yelling. I was like really afraid of pulling that off in the studio as well. So I literally had to get drunk, because if I approach this as unsure as I’m feeling it’s just not gonna work. So my solution was to just get very drunk and nail it the first time, so I didn’t have to think about it again.

All of these songs were recorded live, right?

MICHELLE: Yeah, we recorded live together. All the guys were in one room and I was in a vocal booth. They had a monitor so they could hear me, which was so awesome. Feeding off of each other’s energy was what made it so much more fun than track-by-track, spending a whole two days on drums and then a whole two days on guitar and everyone’s trying to make it perfect. We just wanted to sound like we do when we play live.

We wanted to try not to exhaust the songs too much. And Jack Shirley is really good at that. He didn’t want us to get in our head about it. He just wanted to be like, “That was tight. It was together. We’ll move on now.”

9. “Spaced Out”

This is a really a fun one. I can imagine it in a live setting.

MICHELLE: This one’s kind of funny, because when we were writing we had a lot of songs to choose from, and I somehow missed the conversation where the guys all decided this song was too far from being finished. Like, let’s just scrap this one and focus on the other stuff we have. I missed that conversation completely. I went home and wrote lyrics to it. I thought it was done. I thought it was awesome. I was literally jumping around, having so much fun writing the lyrics of the song. Then I finished it and sent it to them, and they’re like, “Wait, we weren’t going to use this song.” But I was like, “Trust me!” From their contribution, they felt like the song wasn’t finished. But I was like, I hear it in my head so well — the group vocals, the trading off parts, it’s gonna be so awesome. Luckily, they trusted that. It even took up until recording where they were pretty sure the song wasn’t going to be on the record. I think Jack Shirley helped me convince them.

It does feel very different from the rest of the record. It kind of reminds me of Turnstile, but I’m not sure how you feel about that comparison.

MICHELLE: I love them. We weren’t going for that, but I love them. I could see that because it’s more fun.

10. “Newtau”

MICHELLE: This song was named after our cat. His name is “Newtau,” and we adopted him from our neighbor literally the day Gouge Away started practicing again after years of not practicing. I felt like he was our good luck charm.

What kind of cat is he?

MICHELLE: He’s a very big black cat. He’s old and has a very raspy old man voice and he’s adorable.

I saw people saying that “Idealized” gave Sonic Youth vibes, but this song gives me even more Sonic Youth vibes. Especially the speaking vocals.

MICHELLE: Yeah, I can see that. It’s kind of funny because the guys all like Sonic Youth and I intentionally don’t listen to them. Whenever the guys come with an influence, I don’t want to approach the vocals the same way. I want to come at it from my own place. But this is one, I definitely feel like the Sonic Youth vibes are there.

There’s a line that says, “I’m not going to hurt you back,” but the song feels like a way of getting back at them.

MICHELLE: That’s interesting. How so?

I feel like saying “I’m not gonna hurt you back” in the song feels cheeky, like, “This is my way of getting back at you.” With my own experience, I’ve written about people who I resented, and I think I was trying to get revenge on them without realizing it. I feel like writing about something can be a kind of delayed way of getting revenge.

MICHELLE: Yeah, I can definitely relate to the resentment feeling. I don’t know if it comes across in the song at all — it kind of goes hand in hand with “The Sharpening” as well — where sometimes you have relationships with people who just enjoy being mean. For some reason, you want to keep these people in your life. But then you come to this conclusion that maybe the ways that they treat you and the ways they make you feel about yourself — maybe it’s not really reflective of your actual character, but more reflective of the fact that they just like to be mean.

I feel like it’s a weird kind of indulgence in masochism — keeping a mean person in your life. It’s like subconsciously self-destructing but it’s not your fault because it’s someone else doing it.

MICHELLE: Yeah. This is getting deep. This is feeling like therapy right now.

I do have an appointment with my psychiatrist later, so this is the perfect schedule.

MICHELLE: That’s awesome. I need to get that going again, actually. Speaking of therapy, I was in a really ugly friend breakup. Every week, I would come back to my therapist and be like, “I’m trying so hard. I feel like I’m saying everything I can, I feel like I could beg them to be my friend again and they won’t have it.” I was so, honestly, pathetic. Finally, I’d had enough of feeling like shit. One week I came back and was like, “Okay, I stood up for myself and I told them all these things I’ve been waiting to tell them.” And she was just like, “Cool, so you’re tired of being a doormat now.” I think that this song is just about that. Just being fed up with letting someone get away with treating me bad for so long and being like, I don’t want to stoop to your level. I don’t want to act like you and get back at you. But, at a certain point, if you keep trying me… [laughs]

11. “Dallas”

MICHELLE: This is the hardest song. This one is a beast. It first started being written in 2018 at a soundcheck, we were just waiting for things to get started, we were all set up, and the guys started jamming and they made the original version of “Dallas.” This all took place in Dallas, and we just wanted to keep that name because it was cute. But what it is now sounds nothing like where it started. I wrote the lyrics about being really self-destructive and impulsive and reckless because of being depressed, and realizing, through conversations with my mom and Tommy, that I was hurting them by hurting myself and acting recklessly. It’s about that turning point of wanting to treat myself better and get better for them first, still not even really considering myself, but just for them.

I wrote the lyrics to the original version of “Dallas” and the only thing that was working was the vocals. It took a really long time to get there. At one point, it was a total emo song. At one point, it almost sounded like a Circa Survive song. Nothing was a Gouge Away song. We all wanted these the vocals to work but the music just didn’t, until literally the last practice before recording where we just ironed it out and went over and over and over until we got it. We tried a version that was only guitar and no drums [laughs]. We tried everything.

I like the way the song switches up halfway through.

MICHELLE: I had that idea because we would write all these versions of songs and it would be like, the first half is awesome but the second half sucks, or the first half sucks but the second half is awesome. I was like, “What if we literally glue the two parts that we like together?” It was hard to just do that, but we figured it out with this little bridge. I like how it sounds kind of like two different songs. I think it works with this one.

I saw that you were nervous about putting out a six-minute song.

MICHELLE: We didn’t even really think about it. But once we put it out, all the reactions were like, “Six-minute Gouge Away song!” I was like, oh, yeah, we’ve never done that before.

I also saw you said that making the music video was impossible. What happened there?

MICHELLE: I had a whole script written. I had a whole narrative idea of what I wanted the music video to be. I worked with our director Caleb Gowett on it for literally months. Just days before everyone came to Portland, we did the show that we filmed it at and everything fell through. The weather was bad. So we had to cancel everything outside. One person got COVID and couldn’t come. One guy completely bailed and just didn’t show up. It turned into just a live performance video, which is still good. I mean, that’s the thing Gouge Away is about. So it’s fine. But it’s just crazy; it was not supposed to be this video.

What was it supposed to be?

MICHELLE: I wanted to have us playing the show and leaning into the idea of being absent. While everything is going on, I wanted to run away from the show and hop in the back of a pickup truck and literally escape. In my head, it’s very cool. But I’m also not an actor, so it took a lot of pressure for everything just to fall apart.

What inspired you to put everything into this music video?

MICHELLE: I love music videos. It’s been really cool to see our peers and bands that I like who are on similar levels to us like Spiritual Cramp and Militarie Gun doing really cool music videos where they’re acting and making up narratives. They’re so fun to watch that I wanted to try something new. But I guess next time…

Deep Sage is out 3/15 on Deathwish.