Band:	Blind Girls
Album:	An Exit Exists
Style:	Screamo
Release date:	July 2024
A review by:	RaduP

01. Dissonance
02. Loveless
03. Blemished Memory
04. Less Than Three
05. Make Me Nothing
06. Pallid Mask
07. Closer To Hell
08. AI Generated Love Letter
09. Lilac
10. Death Of An Unsung Thought
11. ...It's Starting To Rain
12. Home Will Find Its Way

The blind leading the blind.

Listen! This is a 22 minutes album. It's one of those very emotionally intense punk album that really love their screaming and the fast paces. So I'm gonna do my best to write this review within a single playthrough. Not my first one don't worry. But pardon the ensuing stream of consciousness approach that would perhaps lead to unwelcome results. I rarely have this little time within a single playthrough, and though it's not something that's unique to Blind Girls but rather a commonplace for grind and punk and whatever else in that area, and I'm pretty sure I can find even shorter full length albums that I reviewed (and I would without the self-imposed reviewing speedrun), and maybe my gimmick for this review would give the wrong impression that An Exit Exists is an album that's rushed and improvised.

First off, I got to know Blind Girls through their The Weight Of Everything album from back in 2022, an album that felt surprisingly appropriate for the times, but one whose emotional intensity and encapsulation of the whole "burden of existence" thing didn't rely on it being tied to any context. That's an album that already added a stronger mathcore leaning to the emoviolence/screamo base that their early EPs and debut album, Residue, had, and that's a trajectory that An Exit Exists continues, though bits of post-rock and post-hardcore do also make their presence known in the more mellow parts.

Oh fuck, I'm already halfway through. Quick fun fact: all three of Blind Girls' full lengths have a runtime between 21 and 22 minutes exactly. At this point I'm sure they figured that out too and its intentional. Speaking of "mellow parts", while An Exit Exists does have its fair share of the "controlled chaos" nature of mathcore, with plenty of dissonant and angular riffing in its most intense moments, it does feel like it has more of a focus on creating a depressing and distressing atmosphere, with a lot of moments that pull back on the intensity to push the dynamics. That's either complete switches to more post-rock inspired soundscapes at times, or the usual mellower screamo moment, or points where the vocals continue with the same intensity but the instrumentals pull back. Plus, it's easy to be depressing and distressing when the vocal performance sounds this agonized.

It does feel like a lot of things go well for An Exit Exists. The production is professional enough to put an accent on the soundscapes without compromising the rawness of the performance and without feeling too suffocating. The songwriting manages to pack a lot of dynamism in songs that range between one and three minutes in runtime, no exception. The performance side of things is quite outshined by Sharni Brouwer's vocals, but there's nobody being a slacker among Blind Girls. A lot of albums revel in their intensity to the point where even a runtime as short as An Exit Exists' 20 minutes feels like an endurance test. But not this one. As I hear "Home Will Find Its Way", I know I wish there was more of it.