After the Burial

There are sonic boundaries Matthew McDougal just isn’t willing to cross. The vocalist for long-running Connecticut quintet Boundaries is sitting in his apartment to discuss the devastating attack of the band’s fourth album, Yearning: the unbeautiful after. From the opening strains of “Skies cast amber black,” released last March as the record’s first single, it’s clear that the group are needling into an extreme period — note-split dissonance, mosh beats and detonated bass subs that crater the earth. For his part, McDougal’s brash screams aren’t caging his disdain for humanity, the vocalist leaning into a dirt-pounding break with a contemptuous “Fuck you.” It’s an abrasive fracas that violently veers itself askew from the the sound of some of the biggest players in the contemporary heavy scene — and intentionally so. Though drummer Tim Sullivan adds earnestly yelping, emo-adjacent vocalizations to otherwise metalcore-minded pieces like “May this pain never leave,” the new Boundaries isn’t binding beefy breakdowns to glossy synth production, arena-sized hooks or modern-R&B-style crooning. “One of our guitarists calls it ‘just-woke-up vocals,’ with a guy just whispering into a microphone,” McDougal says through a laugh, reiterating that Boundaries aren’t interested in making a pop-style bid for everyone’s attention. “I think that’s a very serious threat on the landscape of a style of music that used to be for people that liked stuff that wasn’t the norm. To me, it just feels like it’s getting more normal.” Boundaries’ frontman explains that his band went all-in with the aggression on Yearning: the unbeautiful after, which they worked on alongside producer Drew Fulk (Knocked Loose, Motionless in White). It finds them amping up the intensity through brimstone-stirring blasts (“The leper’s bell”) or while McDougal maintains a terror-bree’d roundtable with Make Them Suffer’s Sean Harmanis and Alex Reade (“Torn wide open”). Perhaps darkest of all, the album also contends with the profound loss they felt over the recent deaths of multiple friends, including Dave Shapiro, the Sound Talent Group agency founder who perished in a 2025 plane crash that claimed six lives. Parts of the album are dedicated to and reflect upon those that “disappeared overnight” yet remain in McDougal’s thoughts each day. The urgency of Boundaries music and message embrace the idea of celebrating the circle of people around you and making lasting moments while you still can (“Take the time, even if your social battery is crushed and you don’t think you’ve got it in you today,” McDougal says). This includes teaming up with the Plot in You vocalist Landon Tewers on “Crowned and crucified,” a song Boundaries also co-wrote with longtime friend Isaac Hale, the Knocked Loose guitarist who they’ll be traveling with this fall on a package tour that also includes rapper Denzel Curry and post-grunge heavies Superheaven. Perri Leigh You guys have said that part of the drive behind this album was to make heavy music sound dangerous again. When was the last time you felt, as a fan, that music was seriously scary?Matthew McDougal Interesting. I think it depends on the genre, because what is dangerous in certain genres doesn’t necessarily make me feel that way in others. When I think midwest emo’s version of dangerous — which is to say that it’s operating on some type of razor’s edge, or that it’s pushing some type of limit — I would say 2008-2009 is when we were in a sweet spot of that type of music trying to be really honest and really challenging to its listener. If you go with something that’s more mainstream-ish deathcore — your Suicide Silences, your Bring Me’s, your After the Burials, your Veil of Mayas — 2005-06 was the sweet spot for that. But I guess what I mean is that it feels like the environment for heavy music is not at an all-time high. It’s a pretty bad time to put out heavy music, unless you’re a caricature of it. Like, within the last year or two, you’re starting to see revival core — people leaning into MySpace deathcore and slam. Those bands formed and instantly popped off, because there was such a demand for it… because everything else had become so vanilla. We’re trying to find out what the next direction of really challenging heavy music is. Within the last couple of years it’s been OK, but I think it’s only OK now because of how bad the environment for heavy music became — you know, people more or less wanted pop bands with downtuned guitars. A lot of people still really want that, but I think that’s the antithesis of heavy music. By that same token, there are emo-ish melodic vocals integrated on some of these songs. That detracts from the heavy, in a certain sense.Absolutely, because I don’t know if anyone wants to listen to an hour of breakdowns. I don’t want it to become exhausting to listen to, and I also want to experiment with aspects of other genres that I enjoy. If I listen to a 12-song, all-heavy record, that doesn’t mean that it’s interesting just because it’s pure-to-form — no singing, no synths, no strings. It’s not as black and white as all that. How much more challenging or threatening of a sound is this album compared to 2024’s Death is Little More? Did you have to rediscover your edge?Definitely. We went into our last record with the mindset of, “Let’s do our heaviest record, bar none. If anyone listens to this and listens to previous stuff, there will be a noticed tone shift. Let’s do that.” So, we went into it with this very clear-cut goal. If we ever strayed from the path, we could remind ourselves, “Hey, here’s what we were trying to do.” But after doing that, it’s like, “OK, how do we follow that?” Like, “How do we find something that’s familiar to the people that like our previous work, but doesn’t just feel like we’re putting out something that you’ve already heard.” It had to be more extreme, and part of that is trying to make the heavy and scary parts heavier and scarier, and trying to make the melodic and pretty parts more melodic and even prettier, to embody the whole spectrum of the genre. Spend less time in the middle and more time trying to bring out those extremes, to show our full birth of what we think we’re capable of. How did “Skies cast amber black” set the tone for this current era of Boundaries?I think it falls pretty well into the description I just gave of trying to dig deeper into those heavy spots. Of trying to be more unrelenting, to make music that feels urgent, panicked and on top of you. So, we did our version of death metal and more melodic-style metal, meets something core-oriented, Like, how do we put breakdowns into it? How do we make it feel like there’s parts of the song that encourage a showgoer to participate or have a certain feeling? The record starts with “Malconscience.” Removing this from the context of the lyrics somewhat, you’ve got a nasty mosh call before the breakdown: “I just want to see you suffer.” You’re probably going to see people hammering the shit out of each other in front you after that.That’s the goal! Songs like “Death will follow me” and “May this pain never leave” are reflecting on friends who passed away in a plane crash last year. When did that take place in relation to the making of this album, and how did that affect the music you made?It would have been five months before, so it was still very fresh in my head. I was trying to come to terms with it. You know, it’s [still] something very present in my mind when I’m making music — the people that I’ve just very recently lost in my life are people that I only met because of music. By and large, I tried to write a record that was introspective, trying to say something about the trajectory of my own life. Like, what does it mean to want something? Or what does it mean to chase something to whatever fateful end it leads you to? Or what does it mean to re-examine the things that you want? Sometimes you come to the realization that it’s not as important to you as you thought it was. And so, part of that was thinking about relationships that I had. People are in your life, and then one day you wake up to a text saying those people aren’t here anymore. I had to do some internalizing — is it better to not become close with people, because then life can’t take them away from you? Or is it better to white-knuckle your way through life and treat every day like it’s the last time you say hi or bye to someone? Without prying too much, what are your memories of Dave?Dave was a guy that took a chance on us when no one else was really interested in doing so. He was a guy that wasn’t struggling for work — he was actually a very busy guy, one of the three heads of Sound Talent, and he had a massive roster of bands that already required a lot of his attention. You know, there’s something about a type of person that, regardless of whether or not you have something to offer them, treat you with the urgency and the respect of anyone else that they’re going to meet that day. That’s something that resonated with me. So, we worked together for a couple of years. We became close. We were good friends. I had seen him a month before he passed, and I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on that day, about the things I did or didn’t say. It was at Welcome to Rockville. It’s not like we had a fight… it was just another day. I don’t think I even said bye to him. Now when I’m with friends that I don’t see a lot, I take the photo. I take the time to make memories that are permanent, because after Dave passed and I was looking for concrete evidence of all the time that we had spent together, I [only] had a handful of pictures, texts and emails. It was like, “This is it? This is what it amounts to now?” It reminded me of all the opportunities I didn’t take to make something more memorable in that moment. “Crown and crucified” features Landon from the Plot in You. How far back does your friendship go with them?We’ve done a couple of Plot in You tours now. But we didn’t know them before [that first tour]. We just knew that we identified with who they are artistically — which is to say that they make dark, moody, edgy, pensive, really honest, really weird and expressive music. That’s something that we identified with immediately. So, when we did do our first tour together, we became close very quickly. Sometimes it’s cool to deliver a record that’s all us, and sometimes it’s fun to put a couple of your friends on songs to make it a more collaborative creative process. And Landon’s a really creative guy. He works with a lot of other bands. He’s the prime writing force behind everything Plot has done. And he’s just a guy who I trusted to understand what we were going for. So, we were in Australia together, and I asked him, “Hey man, you wanna hop on a song?” He was really excited about it. It seemed like he had been waiting for us to ask him, so I’m glad we did. I think he crushed it. I just saw them two weeks ago, because we did shows together in Ireland. Isaac from Knocked Loose co-wrote that song, too. Was he in the studio with you for that?Yeah, he was! We’ve been friends with him for a while, and he’s always been an excellent friend. He’s a great guy. I think he was in town because he was recording with a side project — like, three songs for a demo, or something. [Knocked Loose] had worked with Drew in the past, so we were like, “Come by! Everyone in this room is friends. Let’s hang out!” We had an Airbnb for six weeks, and he was there for four-five days. He had this riff idea and was like, “I don’t know if I’m ever gonna make it work for any of my bands, but I think you guys could pull it off. It goes something like this.” And we had a song where we didn’t know how to finish it. The planets aligned. You’ve sung onstage with Knocked Loose before. Do you think you’ll have Isaac chugging this out with you guys on the upcoming tour with them?It’d be more up to him than me. I would never be so presumptuous as to be like, “Hey man, I know you gotta play an hour and a half, but why don’t you get up here and play part of this song?” It’s tough to know if we’ll even be playing that song on that tour, just because the record’s not out yet. For all I know, the record comes out and everyone unanimously goes, “This song sucks, I never want to hear it live.” And we’ll go, “OK, my bad. Sorry!” You might’ve revealed a bit of anxiety over whether or not people will embrace these songs. That said, what excites you most about the path forward with Boundaries?What excites me the most is that when we put out the first two singles, everyone shit on us, crazy-style. We got Omega-smoked. Everyone called us sellouts and said they hated it. But then we put out two more singles and the dialogue surrounding the record shifted from, “Wow, they’ve completely lost the plot” to “I think this album’s gonna be great, the album has a little bit of everything on it.” What didn’t people like about the first two singles?The first one was “Skies,” and people were like, “What happened to the riffs?” I don’t know, man… it’s literally one of 14 songs, does everything have to be noodling? Go listen to Polyphia, if that’s what you want. I don’t know why the fuck you ended up listening to my song, if that’s what you need. We just gritted our teeth and were like, “More songs will come out, people will get it.” This interview has been edited and condensed for flow and clarity.