Origami Angel Make Explosive Pop-Punk For the Too-Online on Feeling Not Found

When you look at it for too long, your computer screen can start to feel like a funhouse mirror, absorbing reality and refracting it back to you in innocuous asides stretched into life-and-death extremes and incomprehensible tragedies chopped up into desensitizing bite-sized bits. The internet manufactures reactions at warp speed, feeding off of bright, shiny bait. “Throw some kindle on the ember / Start to blow up like you always wanted to,” Origami Angel’s guitarist and lead vocalist Ryland Heagy patters on the mathy “Underneath My Skin,” begging for the kind of compassion that’s often sought-out but rarely achieved through a glowing screen—the algorithm thrives on millions chasing that intangible high. It’s one of many moments in which Heagy sounds like he’s talking to the internet itself as much as he’s talking to someone through it, much like how the album title Feeling Not Found could refer to either 1) the noun, an emotional or digital dead end, or 2) the verb, the act of feeling lost.

Feeling Not Found is a record full of double-meanings, usually referring to the dichotomy of the digital world and the “real” world. Sometimes the metaphors skew a bit obvious (“Tell me I’ll be safe from the virus in my mind,” Heagy sings on the grungy, chugging “Viral”). Other times, they’re stretched out into scarily realistic 3D models, like on “Where Blue Light Blooms”—in which the members of Gami build upon their humble beginnings as early harbingers of 5th wave emo, expanding on the movement’s more twinkly tendencies and proggy rhythms (courtesy of drummer Pat Doherty). Heagy’s wordplay is clever; he hides behind “firewalls” that he’s built up; he follows a “distant glow” that could either be the light at the end of the tunnel or just more blue light beamed into his eyes by his computer screen. “I’ve been underground for this whole year,” he confesses at the chorus, stuck in a depressive hibernation, unsure of whether or not he’ll see his shadow.

“Sixth Cents (Get It),” a rampaging diss track that combines anti-capitalist fervor with a tongue-in-cheek humor full of Jeff Rosenstockian finesse—“Festival Song” for the streaming era. “Turn blood, sweat and tears into dollar signs / You need that six cents if you’re gonna survive in the big leagues,” Heagy snarls, referring directly to the paltry sum musicians make each time one of their songs gets played on Spotify. “Income, income, income / The outcome is you / Winsome win some win some / You lose a lot of yourself,” he sings. Despite the “Real eyes realize real lies” of it all, it’s a ruthless and more-than-deserved indictment of how streaming platforms like Spotify fabricate scarcity and screw over the artists whose work they run on. The “Sixth Cents” music video is a two-parter, paired with one for the following “Secondgradefoofight,” in which Heagy and Doherty pay visual tribute to artists like Phoebe Bridgers, Modern Baseball and Green Day.

Feeling Not Found is the latest in a string of 2024 releases from D.C. punk bands spinning economic, political and interpersonal disillusionment into raucous hooks. It’s in good company alongside pink balloons by Ekko Astral, Wearing Out the Refrain by Bad Moves and Next Time by the now-defunct Bacchae. In some ways, it feels like a companion piece to another 2024 record by a DMV-based pop-punk band, Combat’s Stay Golden. This isn’t entirely a coincidence, since Combat and Origami Angel are labelmates on Counter Intuitive Records—and since Combat recruited Heagy to produce their album. Stay Golden and Feeling Not Found cover similar lyrical territory: social anxiety, financial concerns, 20something malaise, questioning whether the always-risky decision to forge a career in the music industry is worth it. When you listen to a song like “Epic Season Finale” back to back with “HM07 Waterfall” and hear Combat’s Holden Wolf and Gami’s Ryland Heagy comparing-and-despairing about their peers who took the road more-traveled and are living “normal lives” with more stability, it’s like listening in on two friends embroiled in a vent session, too deep in their own woes to keep each other from spiraling.

I think of Fauxchella’s tradition of Battle Sets—in which two bands share the stage and go back and forth exchanging blows in the form of songs and played-up trash talk. Both Origami Angel and Combat are Fauxchella veterans, and if Fauxchella VIII were to feature a Battle Set in the form of a “Who can freak out about their future louder?” contest, it’d go down in Howards history. I jest (sort of), but on Feeling Not Found, the Gami guys deal with fear and alienation the best way they know how—by cranking the amps all the way up and raging like their lives depend on it.

“Dirty Mirror Selfie” kicks off this feel-bad party, a Warped Tour-indebted single that places the listener in the front car of a rollercoaster at its highest peak and sends them plummeting from the subdued unease of the prologue-like opener “Lost Signal”—a short, Auto-Tuned ballad capturing a moment of eerie stillness at Heagy’s cousin’s funeral. It’s a bit of a false flag lead-in for an album that generally operates in a high-energy ‘00s Boardwalk Amusement Park-kind of pop-punk sound—and occasionally flirts with hardcore, post-punk and ska influences—but it gives the record something to destabilize.

A collaboration with one of punk’s most in-demand producers, Will Yip, Feeling Not Found shows the D.C. duo embracing the niche that they’ve carved out for themselves in their eight years of being a band. It’s clear that they know their loyal and loving audience well, and while their straightforward, tried-and-true pop-punk isn’t reinventing any wheels, it doesn’t need to. It’s a logical continuation of everything that made longtime listeners fall in love with their sound on 2019’s Somewhere City and 2021’s Gami Gang—but even better. Heagy and Doherty are more in-sync with one another than ever before, amping up their already-fiery energy and following through on their commitment to crowd-pleasing.

Origami Angel’s latest LP is a concept album about being too online, but this concept is at its most actualized during the songs in which they log off, or, as the people who probably need to touch grass say, “touch grass.” The catchy, skate punk single “Fruit Wine” starts with Heagy reluctantly dragging himself outside over a backing wall of “ahhhs” and eventually leads into a roaring breakdown primed for wall-of-death pits—he and Doherty navigate each of the song’s zigzagging detours with ease.

Mid-album standout “Wretched Trajectory” feels like a check-in with the narrator of “Fruit Wine” a few hours into the dreaded night out, overcome with insecurity and ready to make a break from a punishing crowd (“I was enjoying myself and then the next thing I know / I’m freaking out in the bathroom at the back of the show”). It’s got the album’s catchiest chorus, one in which Heagy begs for the kind of one-on-one interfacing that can’t be found through the anonymity of a crowd or the internet, and for the romance of doing nothing with the one person who understands: “I’m ready to be alone with you / Even if it means there’s nothing to do.” For that one fleeting moment, he finds the genuine connection he’s been chasing.

Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn, New York, currently based in Wilmington, North Carolina. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Her work has appeared in Stereogum, The Alternative, Merry-Go-Round Magazine, Post-Trash, Swim Into The Sound and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.