In certain circles of underground rock, Cloud Nothings' Attack On Memory was the album that changed everything. About two years earlier, band leader Dylan Baldi released some noise pop home recordings under the name Cloud Nothings, which quickly stirred up buzz at the height of the lo-fi boom, and it caused the Cleveland resident to put together a band after being asked to fly to Brooklyn and open for Woods and Real Estate at Market Hotel. Cloud Nothings quickly signed to Carpark and put out an expanded edition of their debut EP Turning On, followed by their self-titled debut album in 2011, but the lo-fi boom wasn't built to last and Cloud Nothings knew this. Though so many solo indie rock projects with hired bands remain technically solo projects forever, Cloud Nothings took their unlikely formation as a chance to really become a band, a four-headed beast anchored by Jason Gerycz's beastly drumming and TJ Duke's sturdy basslines with Dylan's inventive singing, songwriting, and guitar playing leaing the way. (And at the time, they had guitarist Joe Boyer, who was later replaced by Chris Brown.)
In hindsight, you can hear moments on Cloud Nothings' self-titled LP that suggest they wanted to break away from the lo-fi home recordings that caused the hype machine to latch onto them, but they didn't make a clear break until 2012's Attack On Memory, which turns 10 today. They took a clear interest in post-hardcore, noise rock, and (gasp!) emo, they hit the studio with Steve Albini, and they came out with a heavy rock record. There's screaming! Riffs! A lengthy noise jam! Dylan's knack for sugar-coated choruses still came through (and was stronger than ever) on songs like "Fall In" and "Stay Useless," but this sounded way more like something that could've come out on Vagrant in the '90s than what you would've expected from Carpark in the early 2010s. And at a time before any major music publication had ever published the words "emo revival," Attack On Memory was received as one of the most acclaimed records of the year and it made Cloud Nothings bigger and more respected than ever. There were other indie rock-approved punk bands before Cloud Nothings (Fucked Up, Titus Andronicus), but Attack On Memory veered way closer to the E-word than anything the indie rock music press was touching at the time. There are a lot of factors that played into emo gaining critical approval throughout the 2010s, but the way I see it, Attack On Memory was the big bang.