"Candy Corn" Vinyl
“We’re not here to do the right thing. We never have been.”
Nothing frontman Domenic “Nicky” Palermohas never described his band in more succinct terms. Nothing have always been rule-breakers. Shoegaze renegades who’ve rebuilt the stereotypically lightweight genre in their own bloodyknuckled American image. Outlaw poets spilling existential dread on mile-wide canvasses of fuzz and reverb. Breathing in pain and suffering like oxygen, and exhaling those burdens of survival through a singular outpouring of pulverizing volume and ethereal quietude. Heavy as a thousand tidal waves. Light as ten teardrops.
Beginning as a Philly-born bedroom solo project in 2010, Nothing’s music has always captured the full scale of the human condition, both the blaring anger and the whispering sadness. A Short History of Decay, Nothing’s fifth solo album and first for Run For Cover Records, widens that aperture even further, providing the most hi-def rendering of Nothing to date. The band have never sounded this colossal, never felt this intimate, never been this honest.
A Short History of Decay follows Nothing’s 2020 triumph, The Great Dismal, a dark, steely evolution of the world-weary shoegaze sound they codified on their three previous albums: 2018’s Dance on the Blacktop, 2016’s Tired of Tomorrow, and 2014’s Guilty of Everything. At the time of Dismal’s release, Palermo thought the band might’ve reached its natural conclusion, but then life happened and “the feeling of wanting to do it resurfaced,” he explains. With the strongest arsenal in Nothing’s ever-shifting lineup locked in -- guitarist Doyle Martin (Cloakroom), bassist Bobb Bruno (Best Coast), drummer Zachary Jones (MSC, Manslaughter 777), and third guitarist Cam Smith (Ladder To God, also of Cloakroom) -- singer-songwriter Palermoknew he had the manpower to make the band’s most ambitious record yet.
Ironically, taking a step back is what inspired this step forward. In between touring, making a collaborative post-metal album with Full of Hell (2023’s When No Birds Sang), and launching a multi-generational shoegaze festival called Slide Away, Palermo was able to truly sit still and think for the first time since Nothing began. Without the two-year record cycle chomping at his toes, Nothing’s bandleader spent the last half-decade reading, introspecting, and reflecting on all his band had accomplished -- and all he’d personally lost -- over the last decade-plus of ear-bleeding debauchery. The highs were certainly soaring: countless tours, collaborations with his heroes in Jesu and Prurient, and writing several records that ended up laying the bedrock for the 2020s shoegaze renaissance.
However, those years of creative prosperity also took a toll on Palermo. Nothing’s touring schedule and sometimes hazardously passionate live shows came with a personal cost: regular ER visits, frayed relationships with friends and family, and excessive substance abuse to cope with not having a grounded home life. Finally being forced to sit and interrogate his own missteps, and consider how going all-in on Nothing swallowed any sense of reality outside of the band, allowed Palermo to develop “somewhat of a clarity” about the passing of time. A clarity that was often more frightening than affirming.
“One of the reasons why I like to tour and love to be busy is that I don’t have to look internally,” Palermo says. “It’s been 10 years and I turn around and I’m in my 40s now. Things have changed, my body’s slowing down. I’m feeling exactly the way that I treated myself the past 12-13 years.”
Palermo’s age has manifested most glaringly with the onset of essential tremors, a neurological disorder similar to Parkinson’s disease that causes the body to shake uncontrollably, both physically and verbally. The non-life threatening condition runs in Palermo’s family, and while he’s always known it would catch up to him eventually, it’s become undeniably prominent over the last few years. Since Nothing’s last record, the trembles have become subtly audible in his singing voice.
“It’s another thing that just makes you think, ‘my body’s in a decline right now,” he says. “Things are starting to fall apart.”
A Short History of Decay is, on one level, a documentation of that decline. In a broader sense, it’s a record about truth. Rather than cover up the tremors with reverb, Palermo wanted to leave his own bodily degradation uncharacteristically exposed, a reflection of the radical honesty that encapsulates every sound and lyric on A Short History of Decay. The record begins with “Never Come Never Morning,” a song where Palermo recollects growing up with an abusive father, memories that he’s kept tightly wound throughout Nothing’s career, but that he finally unspools here without any effects to safely obscure the meaning.
“I’m writing about things that I’ve never really talked about before,” Palermo says. “Things I’ve always been scared to write about.”
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