Calling Hours Say Less Orange with Black Smoke Vinyl Edition

Popeye was an established fixture in Southern California, both personally and creatively, as the former frontman for melodic hardcore greats Farside. There was little in his routine to suggest at that point that Popeye’s life was headed for any sort of major change. It felt like an ideal life, in fact, until it didn’t. “It was very solitary, and I guess I was OK with that—or at least I told myself that I was OK with that—until I met the woman who is now my wife,” he explains. “That absolutely changed everything.” At the tail end of 2021, Popeye (Farside) uprooted his entire life to move across the country to the city of Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he would eventually come to meet the rest of his new band Calling Hours: guitarists Thomas McGrath (the Commercials) and Tony Bavaria (the Commercials), bassist Garrett Rothman (don’t Sleep), and drummer Jim Bedorf (don’t Sleep). For Brian McTernan, a celebrated producer with a nearly 30-year history of shaping some of the biggest hardcore records of all time—including albums for HOT Water Music, Turnstile, Circa Survive, and THRICE—advancing Calling Hours from the idea stage to the recording stage was personal: “Popeye is one of his favorite singers of all time,” Rothman explains. “He told me he named one of his cats after Popeye.” The outcome of that collaboration is Say Less, a seven-song record for Revelation Records that revisits the band members’ melodic, post-punk sensibilities while working in a decidedly contemporary direction. It’s also a deep dive into the feelings of displacement and discomfort that punctuated Popeye’s move—a meditation on the intersection of sense of place and sense of self