DS Record Review – NONE SHALL SLEEP – “Hope Dies At Dawn”

New Jersey is home to a lot of great punk rock. None Shall Sleep is another band to add to the list, and their EP, Hope Dies at Dawn is evidence of this. While a lot of punk rock bands burn through their four or five songs pretty quickly, Hope Dies at Dawn is about twenty-ish minutes of music without a dull moment.

“Theme for the Clinically Depressed” feels like a Jawbreaker and Social Distortion love child. Its driving but steady pace and gruff vocals may be familiar but are done well here. I’m a sucker for a song about disillusionment, and this one checks the boxes well. The second track, “Life Will Have Its Way with You,” feels like a different type of beast—almost Fugazi in nature with its constantly moving bassline. “Is This My Uniform?” speeds up the tempo a bit and plays a clip from Bill Murray’s speech at the beginning of Rushmore. I always found the speech humorous, as Max Fischer takes notes about Herman Blume being the best speaker ever, but putting the words over their chords gives the song a bit of a different context. The album closes strong with “Look Good on Paper” and the hyper “Time Is the Enemy.” There’s nothing like a fast song about running out of time lasting four minutes—I mean that in the best way.

You could get punk rock like this in a lot of places, but NONE SHALL SLEEP does it so fucking well. They pull from so many influences it’s almost like listening to a playlist on shuffle. If you like this check out their full-length compilation, A Slow Steady Decline, which features older material from the band. Hope Dies at Dawn is a little more focused and seems to be more of the current sound the band is going for. It isn’t much different, but you can tell time has hardened these guys, in the best way.