Origami Angel

Feeling Not Found, the third full-length record from Washington, D.C. duo Origami Angel, is the one—the rare, undeniable piece of work that defines a sound, a moment, a subculture, a band’s position in the continuum of music. Vocalist/guitarist Ryland Heagy and drummer Pat Doherty have been building to this record since they started the band in 2016, growing it quickly into one of the most exciting and volcanic bands in the American punk and emo communities. A 14-track epic recorded with producer Will Yip at his Studio 4 Recording, Feeling Not Found revolves around the deeply modern experience teased in the title: an emotional and spiritual 404 error, a sensation of cellular-level malfunction and data corruption, of being lost in an oblivion of digital information, and the desperate struggle to reconnect to how it feels to be human and whole.

“I was looking at America as this digital silicon hellscape,” says Heagy. “What came to me was, in this amalgamation, this sea of randomness, I felt not found, you know? It speaks to where we were as a band, and where I was as a person. For about three years until we finished this album, I was in a very, very lost place in my life, and everything felt very random and unstable.”

Heagy and Doherty explore and explode that limbo on a record that demonstrates Origami Angel at the top of their class, cementing their status as a boundary-pushing, breakneck, cross-culture and cross-genre phenomenon. The record is choreographed like a roller coaster, driving seamlessly between sunny easycore jams, crushing metalcore riffing, jazzy indie rock, misty emo, electronic, and so much more. It sounds like precisely what it is, the thing that makes Origami Angel so special: Heagy and Doherty’s twin brains poured out into an audio file, refined but unrestrained, unhinged and profound and in dogged pursuit of a creative expression of their lived experiences.

Heagy and Doherty have been working on the material that comprises Feeling Not Found for years, through the time periods of both their previous LPs, 2019’s Somewhere City and 2021’s breakout smash Gami Gang. Those releases (and the intense, infamous live shows that supported them) established Origami Angel as a unique force that interspersed elements of ’90s math and emo with early 2000s pop-punk and easycore to grow something new and contemporary, something that felt as breakneck and relentless and teetering-on-the-edge as this era of human history.

But the juxtaposition of the band’s rise in notoriety with the pandemic’s sudden requirement of online-only existence for musical performers fucked with Heagy’s head—a duality that runs through the new LP. “Growing up a DIY kid, a punk kid, it was all about the community, and that’s something that I strived to find,” he says. “Then it was like overnight, we had it, then we didn’t, but it’s growing into this thing that I can’t physically interact with. I just triggered my own personal anxieties and my own mental health was really fucked up by that. I was so puzzled by the way that my brain reacted to it.”

When it came time to execute this new chapter, they linked up with Will Yip to bring the record to life at his Conshocken studio. The collaboration had deep emotional roots for Heagy: His cousin, who had tracked with Yip at Studio 4 in 2010, passed away in January 2023. Yip was one of the first people to reach out to Heagy when he heard the news. Heagy shut off—he didn’t want to do anything. But Yip’s compassion urged him onward. “The understanding that we had about that part of what was going on in my life was really, really important,” says Heagy. Opening track “Lost Signal” is about the loss, and the life-altering affirmation Heagy found in a moment of static noise at his cousin’s funeral.

Lead single “Dirty Mirror Selfie” follows, a furious pogo-ready riff that plunges on into a power-pop-punk declaration of intent: “All this time I wasted struggling fighting for things that I thought that I lacked/Now I’m taking that back!” Heagy sings. “Where Blue Light Blooms,” the stunning, operatic second lead single, finds Heagy and Doherty giving a workshop in outside-the-box songwriting and gorgeous chord voicings, including one of the most thrilling bridges you’ll hear on a rock song this year.

Follow-up single “Wretched Trajectory” is an ecstatic, major-key easycore romp through alienation and discomfort, while “Sixth Cents (Get It?)” jacks things up with a classic hardcore intro before shifting gears at a dizzying pace between moods and rhythms. Likewise, twin single release “Secondgradefoofight” starts in at an angelic tone before speeding off to a brain-splitting climax. (Yes, that’s how it’s spelled. As serious as they are about their craft, Heagy and Doherty are still unrepentant goofballs and double-entendre-lovers.)

Heagy and Doherty bring it all to a close on the title track “Feeling Not Found”—Heagy’s frantic riffing and calm, confident vocal cuts in like sun slashing through dusty blinds, before Doherty’s drums blow the blinds right off. All the difficult shit that Origami Angel have tried to work through on Feeling Not Found might not be solved or fixed forever, but there’s a mutual understanding that’s been established along the way, one that provides enough of a reason to keep trying. Heagy’s resolve is clear and powerful: “And I may not feel found, but I’m not as lost as I used to be/And it may not be right, but it’s not as wrong as it usually seems/I can be as here and as real as I want if I want and you’ll never take that away/This out of date software’s here to stay.” Feeling Not Found is out September 27 on Counter Intuitive Records.