Boston hardcore act Defeater released their fourth studio album, Abandoned, in August 2015 on Epitaph.

Unlike most bands—and especially most hardcore bands— Defeater don’t write songs so much as they write histories, and specifically the history of a never-named New Jersey family whose already troubled lives disintegrate into torment, rendered all the more tragic for the depth and detail of singer Derek Archambault’s lyrics. Abandoned is the most relentlessly raw and uncompromising chapter so far, powered by a renewed sense of artistic ambition and a plot twist no one expected.

Abandoned was written and recorded in a welcome period of relief in Archambault’s life, after he’d finally received a life-changing surgery that repaired severe hip damage he suffered in an injury. Archambault’s surgery, he says, allowed him to redouble his connection with his own writing, leaving him clear to truly inhabit what he calls his own Glass family—after the famous J.D. Salinger characters. The new album chronicles the story of a lapsed Catholic priest, whose battles in Europe during the war drag him first toward faith and then his own poisonous faithlessness.