SeeYouSpaceCowboy

Take a deep breath before you listen to The Romance Of Affliction. You’re going to need it. The second full-length by San Diego’s SeeYouSpaceCowboy, it’s a brutal musical and emotional assault on the senses. It’s the sound of total collapse, of darkness closing in, of trying to escape – through drugs, through death, through whatever means necessary – from the horrors of existence. Not just metaphorically, either. Two weeks after the band finished recording it, frontwoman Connie Sgarbossa nearly died from a drug overdose. It was, she admits, a kind of physical manifestation of everything the album’s 13 songs are about.

“Writing music is cathartic to me,” she says. “Getting things on paper is the only way I know how to deal with stuff. So to have that happen two weeks later almost backed up why I wrote the album – it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. There’s a line on this album that goes ‘I think I took too much/Stop breathing’, and that’s literally what happened to me. It reinforced that I wrote the album that I needed to write.”