Underlined Passages Say the Quiet Part Out Loud on "Bright Eyes," off Forthcoming LP, A Quiet Condition

Underlined Passages have a chorus for the moment we're all stuck in: "bright eyes, you're so fucked up."

That's "Bright Eyes," the first song the Baltimore duo is sharing from their new album, A Quiet Condition, out September 10 on Mint 400 Records. It's not a single in the traditional sense — it's the closing track, the last word on a record about watching your life get quietly filed out of the future while everyone's staring at their phones. Michael Nestor and Roger Stewart chose to lead with the ending, and the line doesn't resolve anything. It just says the thing out loud that the rest of the record circles around: something's wrong with all of us, and the algorithm isn't going to fix it.

A Quiet Condition is Nestor and Stewart's follow-up to 2025's The Accelerationists, and it trades that record's confrontational energy for something smaller and stranger. Nestor's guitars are still layered and technicolor, but pulled inward. His vocals sit buried in noise. Stewart's drums hold everything together without ever pushing. The reference points are the ones you'd expect — Nada Surf, American Football, The Promise Ring — but there's a heavier undertow this time, something closer to Deftones, Thursday, and Editors, minus the bombast.

The album is about reaching middle age and realizing the thing you wanted your whole life might not be coming, and nobody tells you when that becomes true. It just gets harder to ignore. Song titles fall apart as the record goes — "Futr" is missing a vowel, several tracks carry "mx" markings like unfinished notes — and "Bright Eyes" is where that unraveling lands hardest, aimed straight at the plasticine, AI-flooded scroll we're all living inside.

Underlined Passages have been making records like this since 2015. A Quiet Condition is gearing up to be their most fully realized album to date.

A Quiet Condition is out September 10 on Mint 400 Records.

Tracklist:

Afterimage

Soft Reception

Paper Lanterns

Out Past Distance

Futr (Bx Mx)

Lament (96 Mx)

Pernod (Ze Mx)

Bright Eyes

Follow the band here.