Fiddlehead: Death Is Nothing to Us Album Review

An inevitable part of the grieving process is realizing that you’re not, in fact, done grieving. Have Heart frontman and hardcore lifer Pat Flynn lost his dad, a Vietnam veteran and high-school English teacher, in 2010. When witnessing his mother’s enduring grief became too heavy, Flynn worked through the secondhand struggle with Springtime and Blind, the 2018 debut album by his post-hardcore band Fiddlehead. Flynn welcomed his own child into the world shortly afterward, and he confronted the cruelty of entering fatherhood in the absence of his own dad on 2021’s Between the Richness. Now Fiddlehead’s third studio album, Death Is Nothing to Us, completes a thematic trilogy on grief, depression, and fighting to move forward.

A high-school history teacher by day and poetry disciple by night, Flynn is keenly aware of how long it takes to process life events, but he also knows better than to romanticize depression. On Death Is Nothing to Us, he comes face to face with the denial stage of grief and works to both acknowledge and overcome it. Grounded by drummer Shawn Costa and bassist Nick Hinsch’s pounding rhythm section, Flynn yells about sleeping away the pain, leaning on friends, and the desire to burn in effigy. While attending Catholic middle school, Flynn was occasionally pulled from class to serve as an altar boy at unattended day funerals, his knees digging into the stiff carpet while contemplating a life forgotten. At his most reflective, he seems to channel that experience here. Yet for all that gloom, Flynn always checks himself. On “Sullenboy,” he refuses to cede control to those “depressive Irish genes” in the name of his two toddlers. “Their day is young and their future’s wide, and I’ll die before I don’t help them rise,” he swears.

Flynn centers the album around the intersection of isolation and togetherness. On “True Hardcore (II),” he sings of the hardcore scene’s ability to unify: “Deeply depressed kids seeking art to mean more than a gathering of friends.” Both that song and “The Woes” reach their emotional peaks by inviting other artists—Angel Du$t’s Justice Tripp and 108’s Kate-08, respectively—to sing along, emphasizing both a shared feeling of loss and a community’s ability to soothe. Flynn peppers his other lyrics with lines borrowed from poets like W.B. Yeats and peers like Alex G, Infest, and the Cranberries. In its openness to outside influence, Death Is Nothing to Us reads like a thank-you note to those who helped Flynn clear away the fog of mourning.