Underlined Passages Confront Collapse on The Accelerationists

The Baltimore trio strip away warmth to examine systems breaking down in real time.

There's a specific kind of exhaustion documented on Underlined Passages' new album The Accelerationists, not the romantic burnout of past indie rock generations, but something more systemic and inescapable. Over eight tightly wound tracks clocking in at just under 26 minutes, the Baltimore band charts the emotional landscape of living under velocity itself, when everything moves too fast to register but somehow nothing changes at all.

Now slimmed down to a trio, Michael W. Nestor on guitar and vocals, Roger Stewart on drums, and Joe Markus on bass, Underlined Passages have shed the relative warmth of last year's Landfill Indie for something considerably more austere. Recorded largely at Baltimore's Magpie Cage with post-hardcore legend J. Robbins (Jawbox, Burning Airlines), with additional sessions helmed by longtime collaborator Frank Marchand, the album balances the band's shoegaze tendencies against a stark, almost clinical precision.

The title borrows from a philosophy gaining traction in Silicon Valley circles, one that suggests leaning into capitalism's contradictions until they rupture. But Underlined Passages aren't theorists, they're witnesses. The Accelerationists draws equally from the techno-optimism of late-'90s Wired manifestos like "The Long Boom" and the affectless dread of Adam Curtis's 2016 documentary HyperNormalisation, creating a record that exists in the gap between promised futures and lived reality.

Opener "Endsong" sets the tone with what might be called negative space, guitars that bristle and recede, drums that hit hard but leave room for silence. "Heywood Floyd," named for the character who witnessed the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, observes architecture without commentary. The guitar work throughout does most of the communicating, speaking in textures where lyrics stay clipped and inward-facing.

Mid-album cuts "Flaxxon" and "Somelin" read like pharmaceutical brand names, and that's precisely the point, they're songs about symptom management when the underlying condition remains untreated. "Tyrannique" suggests power structures through sonic pressure rather than explicit critique. By the time "Remainder" closes the record, what's left isn't resolution but a kind of uneasy equilibrium, the sound of standing still inside collapse.

Underlined Passages have built a reputation in Baltimore's indie scene for emotional intensity delivered through restraint, and The Accelerationists represents their most refined distillation of that approach yet. There are no cathartic releases here, no conceptual frameworks to unlock hidden meaning. Instead, the band offers something more uncomfortable: presence without breakthrough, observation without hope for intervention.

In an era when "acceleration" has become a Silicon Valley talking point for dismantling guardrails in pursuit of superhuman AI, Underlined Passages locate the human cost in that momentum, not through didactic lyrics but through the accumulated weight of guitars that lean into distortion without ever quite breaking, rhythms that push forward while going nowhere. It's the sound of holding your shape under pressure, of maintaining form when the systems promising to support you have long since stopped pretending to work.

Watch the video for "Heywood Floyd"

The Accelerationists is out now via Mint 400 Records. More information at underlineslove.com