John Errol's 'Damage' Is a Cavernous Masterpiece of Self-Made Dread
The Sonic Breakdown
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: Errol did all of it — wrote, produced, mixed and mastered Damage alone, a fact both The Line of Best Fit and Paste confirm. Tobias Hess at The Fader describes the result as “walls of guitar, washed out vocals, and booming live drums.” Much of the colour came from a Casio SK-1 Errol found on the street; he told Hess, “I used it on 70% of the record.”
The Spatial Dynamics: Andy Steiner’s A- review at Paste nails the paradox: the album is “simultaneously cavernous and claustrophobic.” He notes that “every guitar strum on ‘Float’ is shrouded in reverb,” while the songwriting underneath stays “hearty and almost traditional,” built on guitar solos, drum smacks and pop hooks. Hess, who spent five years watching these songs get workshopped at Zebulon and Gold Diggers, says the record “feels almost heavy with time.”
Standout Performance
Errol’s own voice is the instrument doing the heaviest lifting. Steiner writes that it “can flip from an unnerving whisper to an emo-indebted burst in seconds,” and picks “Loser” as the album’s peak — a song whose classic hook Errol pushes “to its gravest implications,” turning snark into threat. Steiner calls it, simply, “a gem of a song.”
Why It’s Certified
⚡ Steiner’s verdict on this “sublime and devastating new record”: “John Errol makes the damage feel good.”
🌈 Steiner also catalogues the imagery Errol works in — “knives and teeth, fire and snakes, blood and broken ribs” — and calls the album horror “without a knowing wink or sense of fantasy.”
🌈 Range to spare: “Shifting Sands” is an eight-minute ballad Steiner says “could sit at the center of a Bon Jovi record,” and “Lake Travis” “boasts a whiskey-downin’ hook by way of Lady Gaga’s ‘You and I.’”