The in between hours are the spaces where alchemical magic occurs. 4am night sweats, churning up the stubborn loose ends and residues of unfinished business, that restless awareness of the oblique demands dawn will bring, and stray thoughts flooded with sudden significance – they’re all given an unconstrained, vivid urgency that our more clear-cut, daylight co-ordinates can’t access.

Steeped in nocturnal, death rock adventurism, riven with a post-punk anxiety that feels increasingly like the twitching heart of our modern age, and driven by hardcore punk intensity, the second studio album from Boston’s Final Gasp, New Day Symptoms, does what all great rock records do. Not only does it place itself within a lineage, summoning up and amplifying a spectrum of powers from rock’n’roll lore, it makes them resonate in the here and now. It gives voice to those fears and frustrations lurking just under the surface of waking consciousness and turns them into a rallying cry.

Throughout New Day Symptoms, Final Gasp create a potent reaction from the furious and the forlorn, guitarist/frontman Jake Murphy’s vocals both a supercharged howl into the void and a remorseful echo back. But where the band’s 2023 debut, Mourning Moon, was a concentrated shot of acrid, underground death rock, its propulsion tanks largely filled with references to Samhain and Killing Joke, New Day Symptoms keeps all the core urgent energy while vastly broadening its scope. With new space to explore, this is an album that feels like communal, a mapping of personal trials and dark recesses onto a map dotted with rafters-rousing marker points.

Through Look Away’s driving-through-a-pyroclastic-cloud kineticism, chased by the ghosts of In Solitude and Swervedriver, through the anthemic, acid-corroded vistas of Look Away and gothic tub-thumping beat of Gifted Shame to No Hand To Lead’s channelling of Don’t Fear The Reaper’s loping groove and Prediction’s contrast of insurgent riffs and minor-key bracing for disappointment, New Day Symptoms takes the familiar into uncharted territory and makes the unfamiliar instantly, internally recognisable.

Final Gasp’s ability to meld opposing forces into something vibrant and new is encoded into their DNA. Emerging from Boston’s mold-breaking hardcore scene that gave rise to the renegade likes of Converge, Isis and Cave In, they were initially inspired by Glenn Danzig’s cult horror punks Samhain. The process of forging a sound that combined but went beyond their musical background and musical obsessions was one that took a lot of soul-searching, taking them on a path whose destination remains open-ended.

“I think we’re still figuring it out, to be honest,” says Jake. “If you look at pictures of us when we first started six years ago, it was very obvious that were a Samhain and Christian Death worship band. But we also realised we could do so much more. We just blossomed into this weird group of people that all have similar influences, but see them from different perspectives. So if I come up with a riff that reminds me of Killing Joke, Peter (Micanovic, guitarist) will translate it into something else that works too. We could hear the band naturally becoming its own thing after a while.”

One of the main reasons for the broadening of the band’s sound on the new album is that New Day Symptoms was written much more as a democratic process than Mourning Moon.

“It got me personally more excited,” Jake enthuses, “because everything was on the table and we'll know if it's going to work or if it's not. Peter’s classically trained, and having him go, ‘I’m going to throw this lead here’ which we were so against at first, because we were like ‘We're not that kind of band’, it made me become a better guitar player too, and we’re all on the same page now. You hear harmonies and quick leads, which you only hear once, but it’s so sick.” It’s that open-mindedness while still being fully in touch with your underground roots – as Jake puts it, “It’s attitude, it’s doing it for yourself and not giving a fuck. It’s giving it your all, but you're also gonna look cool as hell while you're doing it and you're not even trying.” – that gives New Day Symptoms such a galvanizing force. But where its predecessor dealt very directly with personal themes of loss and anxiety, here a slightly different approach was taken.

“With this one, I actually wanted to minimise the emotion,” says Jake. “I didn't want it to be as personal. But then reading the lyrics back, I ended up feeling more personal about them after, because your subconscious always comes through. One of the songs I wrote was just being on tour and then seeing all types of roadkill. But it made me feel something completely different that's more personal to me. It's not your diary, it's about seeing something on the road that's dead and wondering what it was trying to do. Was it trying to get out of the road or was it a case of, there's no hope I'm just going to jump in front of this car right now. That's how I think about it.”

Another song [song title] deals with a homeless man living off the grid that Jake used to see in his youth, whose tent encampment was burned down by the police and froze to death in the process of trying to rebuild it. It’s that ability to perceive a sense of loss from an outside perspective that make it resonate more widely, and gives us greater perspective to deal with our own. New Day Symptoms ends with the title track, a clenched fist wrapped in potassium-reaction, Geordie-esque riffs, complemented by the restless, atmospheric final comedown of Pale Sun, both existing on the borderland of trepidation and hope that Final Gasp have made their own. After all, a symptom is never an omen of anything good.

“It's like a curse of joy,” Jake laughs, “where you were so happy but when that is stripped away you're thinking, why did that feel so good? It’s being haunted by that good feeling, and that's what we were going for on this record. It should make you feel something. It should grab you and hold your attention in the sense of hold on to today because you don't know what tomorrow is going to bring.” Above all, New Day Symptoms is one of those rare killer rock’n’roll albums whose conviction and honesty make it, unique, primed to stand the test of time, and, as acclaimed tours with bands as divergent as Anvil and Imperial Triumphant make clear, unlimited in their appeal.

As Jake concludes, “We don't really know what we are anymore, we just write the music we want to hear, and we have our obvious influences there, but it becomes so much more than that at this point. If you like punk, you're going to be into

Final Gasp. If you like hardcore you going to like Final Gasp. If you like metal you're going to like Final Gasp. If you like goth, you gonna like Final Gasp. It really is something for anybody.”