SeeYouSpaceCowboy

Every single song SeeYouSpaceCowboy have released since forming in 2016 has been deeply rooted in the life experience and trauma of frontwoman Connie Sgarbossa. It’s one of the things that makes the San Diego band’s music so compelling and visceral, because those oftentimes harrowing experiences flow through its veins. Whether that’s existential anguish, substance addiction or suicidal ideation (and attempts), Sgarbossa has never been afraid to detail her pain and torment in excruciating detail. She holds nothing back, and combined with the band’s intensely dark (and darkly intense) blend of sasscore, punk, mathcore and metalcore, it’s always made for profound and devastating listening. Coup De Grâce is no exception to that rule. The band’s third album, it follows on from 2019’s The Correlation Between Entrance And Exit Wounds and 2021’s The Romance Of Affliction. But unlike those two records, which were unadulterated, no-holds-barred accounts of her life at the time, Coup De Grâce takes a different approach to its lyrics. Rather than Sgarbossa baring her most private and innermost thoughts for all to hear, on these 12 songs they’re funneled through the lives of fictional characters within a noir-inspired world of the singer’s invention.

It makes sense, then, that the record begins with something utterly unlike anything the band has ever made before: a sax-laden, smoky, late night smooth jazz ballad. At least, that’s the identity “Allow Us To Set The Scene” assumes for its first 65 seconds, as St Louis-based singer Iris.EXE does just that. ‘A maze of alleys and havens for the delightful and depraved as our concrete backdrop,’ she narrates over the saxophone before bursting into song. It immediately draws the listener back to a time and place that exists decades in the past, a Moulin Rouge-esque club that’s not quite in the real world—and it’s within that parallel decadent and dystopian universe, and its various buildings, that everything then plays out. That ‘everything’ is just as personal as anything the band—completed by Connie’s brother Ethan (guitar/vocals), Taylor Allen (bass/vocals), Tim Moreno (guitar) and AJ Tartol (drums)—have ever released, but it manifests itself across Coup De Grâce’s 12 songs in an entirely different way than before. And with valid reason, too.
“The record started as a visual idea,” explains Sgarbossa, “because when it came to lyrics, I didn’t know what the fuck to write at first. I’m not a drug addict junkie anymore, so I'm not going to write another album like The Romance Of Affliction—I can't, and I don't want to. So my mind wandered to things that I love, like Frank Miller's Sin City graphic novels, where there are all these stories interlaced within a city. That led me to think about noir and neo-noir, and then pulp comics and novels from the ’40s and ’50s, which started to make it all come together lyrically and thematically, where each different song can be a different tale of the city."