Charmer: Downpour
Charmer: Downpour
Counter Intuitive Records 5/23/2025
Michigan’s Charmer makes it rain on their latest full-length Downpour. A confident new entry into their growing discography that inches further into the conundrums of maturity even as the ghosts of youthful outcry still haunt the verses and choruses of their discontent. You might not find answers to life’s mysteries in these songs, but you’ll luxuriate in the shared commiseration like a warm bath after a bad day.
What wave of emo are we on? Reddit tells me we’re somewhere deep into the fifth iteration, which I’ll take as gospel. With so much evolution and complexity in the subgenre, teased out over multiple generations, it’s feasible to frame Charmer as an emo band while still waxing poetic about the musical range of Downpour. The sentimental bric-a-brac and slight SoCal sneer are firmly in place. Beyond these typical genre markers, though, the path is wide open and Charmer is free to blaze a trail through the rock n roll wilderness.
Songs like “Scream” and “Blink” go hard. A medium-to-fast tempo sweeps you along with heavy, distorted riffs keeping pace with the cannonade percussion of Nick Erickson and the barrelling bass of Zack Alworden. Shades of screamo imbue the vocal layers with the manic intensity of a feeling desperate to find expression. If the composition discovers a quiet moment, like in the latter half of “Scream,” it’s only for the sake of laying it on even thicker and louder in the closing measures.
Alternately, a song like “Night” keeps its roll slow to start, reeling off a sweet and poppy sound that Buddy Holly wouldn’t have turned up his nose at. The intensity ramps up shortly, flipping into what seems like an almost obligatory nod to loud/quiet/loud dynamics. Charmer can whip up a wall of guitar noise, they like to do it, and it’s a rare entry into the album that doesn’t lob a musical hand grenade into the fray.
“Swords Dance” might be an exception to the trend, cultivating a pleasant, even-keeled, psych surf rock sound that resists setting off fireworks for their own sake. Charmer knows how to write a song that will turn the concert pit into a human threshing floor, and they do plenty of it on Downpour. It makes a gentler number like “Swords Dance” stand out all the more.
Whichever direction each song is pulling on Downpour, one recurring trait that marks them all is strong vocal work from David Daignault and Neil Berg. There’s more than mere vocal layering at work here. The pair works in a tandem to deliver the lyrics in complex clusters, which, in songs like “Arrowhead,” achieve a nearly fugal-type of density. Sounding, repeating, circling back on themselves in rounds to create a kind of echo chamber of coming-of-age angst. And it’s caught on tape with outstanding fidelity by Brett Romnes at The Barber Shop Studios.
So which wave is Charmer emo? Let’s call it elder fourth wave. The band’s artfulness rejects the commercialized version of the third wave, reconnects with the experimentalism of the second wave, while still respecting the sonic tropes and customs enough to avoid dissolution in the “anything goes” atmosphere of fifth wave emo. Take that for what it’s worth. Genre is a hallucination at the end of the day.
What’s true, real, and powerful are the emotions that drive this music. Charmer knows how to parcel out the pathos of youth into bite-sized portions. And they know where the bodies are still buried when we’re all grown up, pretending that we’ve figured it all out. Downpour is a reminder that we haven’t, delivered with enough style to provide us a kind of catharsis, if not comfort. The hurt remains, but we’ve found ways to forget about it for a little while. In this economy, I’ll take what I can get.
Charmer
What wave of emo are we on?