Balance and Composure Announce New Album

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Balance and Composure will release With You In Spirit on October 4th. Today they’ve shared a video for “Cross to Bear.”

Track Listing

1. restless
2. ain’t it sweet
3. any means
4. cross to bear
5. believe the hype
6. lead foot
7. sorrow machine
8. a little of myself
9. closer to god
10. with you in spirit

with you in spirit, the new album from Balance and Composure, is an arresting, atmospheric collection of melodic post-punk and towering rock.

Due out October 4 on long-time collaborator and Grammy-nominated producer Will Yip’s Memory Music, it’s the band’s first LP in eight years, and a thrilling full-length comeback after their four-year hiatus. It thunders and stirs, dipping between beautiful, crystalline arrangements and punishing, earth-shaking climaxes; in between all, a gripping, near-physical tension crackles and growls and grooves, waiting to rip open.

Vocalist and guitarist Jon Simmons approaches with you in spirit with intense self-reflection, examining and uprooting the very supports on which a life is built. Preemptive grief, wrestling with faith, familial responsibility and mortality were all weighing heavily while he wrote these lyrics.

Musically, this record feels like Balance and Composure's true form––collectively, Simmons, lead guitarist Erik Petersen, guitarist Andy Slaymaker, bassist Matt Warner, and drummer Dennis Wilson are pulling from the best parts of themselves, exploring new depths while paying homage to where they've been, too.

Will Yip's contribution on production, co-writing, and even releasing the record via his own label cannot be understated, either, and it also explains why the band refers to him as an unofficial 6th member of the band. 

"I truly believe that this is the best collection of Balance and Composure songs there's ever been," he says. "It has the heavy stuff, it has the fast stuff, it has the groovy stuff. It has everything they've worked on over the last 12 years."

Sometimes, the record itself feels like a band grappling with its own avoidance, its own mortality, and deciding to face these things the only way they know how. Balance and Composure are with us in spirit, yes, but in the flesh, too, for now.  

“You’re not alone with laments,” Simmons calls in a long, airy phrase midway through the record, “and you don’t belong to the dead yet.”

2016’s Light We Made was meant to be the final full-length record from Pennsylvania rock band Balance and Composure. When they announced their breakup in 2019, things weren’t clicking the way they used to; it felt like the group had run out of road. But when the pandemic took hold the following year and ripped away all routine, vocalist and guitarist Jon Simmons started to miss his long-time bandmates.

Eventually, Petersen reached out to his former bandmates with a simple question: How would they feel about simply trying to write music together again? Everyone agreed—the absence had weighed heavily on them, and the friends gathered in October 2022 and began to write new songs. 

“I began to feel like a kid again,” says Simmons. “We were writing these songs for the pure reason of having an outlet and getting together with your friends, no pressure. We were longing for it, and we found it as soon as we got together. We didn’t want that train to stop.”

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