Try to organize all the emo subgenres into a flow chart and you’ll either give yourself a headache or run out of room. For simplicity’s sake, it’s best to split emo into two halves representing key influences on the genre: punk and indie rock. (Don’t make me tap the sign.) Vancouver quartet water margin is a clear-cut example of a band born from the former, and their official introduction, Gleaming Cursed, leaves no room for mistaking their suave evolution from that starting point. An astonishingly self-assured debut, it builds off the emo and post-hardcore of 1990s forebearers without resorting to filler or redundancies.
After growing up on a steady diet of Drive Like Jehu, Fugazi, and Unwound, water margin’s members—singer-guitarists Geordon Gaskill-Cadwallader and Jean-Michel Lacombe, bassist Arman Paxad, and drummer Patrick Williams—looked beyond those bands’ cultivated mystique to instead learn their distinct language: thick, rolling bass tone pushed up in the mix; guitars that jab at each other like fencers; drum patterns that shift downbeat placements and smooth drumrolls into one trilling whole note. In repeating it back, however, water margin don’t crib from their heroes or namecheck for clout. Instead, their songwriting and stylistic flair is naturally in conversation with the past. Take the extended breakdown of “Cryptogoth,” where they so carefully reintroduce instruments, one caustic guitar riff and flailing drum fill at a time, that the single could easily be mistaken for a lost Jade Tree 7” that Numero Group would scramble to reissue.
Across nine songs, water margin invoke hallmarks of the genre’s underground scene: the muscular guitar melody of “Plague Runner” is so John Reis-coded that Spotify algorithms could mistake it for Hot Snakes; the stilted pauses in “Tiger Ward” recall the Van Pelt’s looming moods; both “Palisades” and “Shy of Merit” ebb in tempo like the cautious moments of heftier Jets to Brazil or Jawbox songs. Even better, two of water margin’s most prominent influences are fellow Canadians: Their unremitting bass lines evoke those by the short-lived and underrated Ottawa post-hardcore ’90s trio Shotmaker, and their ambitious punk hollering could fit on Outer Heaven by the defunct 2010s Toronto greats Greys. It’s as if water margin burned their own emo greatest-hits CD in 1999, let the blazing sun melt it on the seat of their Chevy Corsica, and swirled a distilled version of that liquid plastic into nine original songs made of sleek tungsten.
