Feeling Not Found, the third full-length record from Washington, D.C. duo Origami Angel, is the one-the rare, undeniable piece of work that defines a sound, a moment, a subculture, a band’s position in the continuum of music. Vocalist/guitarist Ryland Heagy and drummer Pat Doherty have been building to this record since they started the band in 2016, growing it quickly into one of the most exciting and volcanic bands in the American punk and emo communities. A 14-track epic recorded with producer Will Yip at his Studio 4 Recording, Feeling Not Found revolves around the deeply modern experience teased in the title: an emotional and spiritual 404 error, a sensation of cellular-level malfunction and data corruption, of being lost in an oblivion of digital information, and the desperate struggle to reconnect to how it feels to be human and whole. Heagy and Doherty explore and explode that limbo on a record that demonstrates Origami Angel at the top of their class, cementing their status as a boundary-pushing, breakneck, cross-culture and cross-genre phenomenon. The record is choreographed like a roller coaster, driving seamlessly between sunny easycore jams, crushing metalcore riffing, jazzy indie rock, misty emo, electronic, and so much more. It sounds like precisely what it is, the thing that makes Origami Angel so special: Heagy and Doherty’s twin brains poured out into an audio file, refined but unrestrained, unhinged and profound and in dogged pursuit of a creative expression of their lived experiences.
