Album Of The Week: Quicksand Bring On The Psychics

Every once in a while, a little alarm goes off in my head, the "sounds like Turnstile" alert. A band doesn't have to sound that much like Turnstile to set that trigger off. I just hear a few things — a galloping tempo, a clean vocal, a big riff with a whole lot of bounce — and that's where my brain goes. It's not a good thing or a bad thing, necessarily. For as big a band as they are, Turnstile haven't inspired too many direct imitators. They loom over the entire hardcore landscape in 2026, but the underground has largely turned toward heavier, more antisocial sounds, which only makes the alarm bleep that much more forcefully when something does sound at least a little bit like Turnstile. When that internal alarm beeped on the first track of Quicksand's new album Bring On The Psychics, I had to correct myself. By definition, a Quicksand song cannot sound like Turnstile. Turnstile can only sound like them.

Quicksand's history stretches back to a wild era of New York hardcore, a time that continues to reverberate through the genre and elsewhere. As a teenager, Walter Schreifels had already already spent time in hugely important NYHC bands like Gorilla Biscuits, Youth Of Today, and Warzone. At 21, he got into other things, like shoegaze and not being straightedge anymore. He recruited ex-members of other NYHC bands like Bold and Burn, and they slowed hardcore down into something spacier and groovier. The band got snapped up in the post-Nirvana major-label signing frenzy, released a couple of beautifully churning cult-favorite albums, headlined the first-ever Warped Tour, and broke up before the '90s were over.

The term "post-hardcore" has come to mean other things, but it was first coined to describe Quicksand and bands like them. The two albums from Quicksand's first incarnation, especially their 1993 debut Slip, are beautiful little miracles, records that could've only existed because one guy had a very specific itch at a very specific time and fused a bunch of disparate sounds into something truly vital. Quicksand's music resonated far beyond hardcore, as bassist Sergio Vega's long tenure as a Deftone can attest. Tons of bands learned from Quicksand's example, Turnstile very much included.

I was still a little surprised when Quicksand's new album opener "Get To It" set off my internal Turnstile alarm. Quicksand have been back for a while. They played their first reunion show in 2012. Since then, they've toured heavily and released a couple of remarkably sharp post-reunion albums. With the release of Bring On The Psychics, Quicksand 2.0 reaches album number three, one more than the band's first incarnation managed. These days, Walter Schreifels plays shows with basically all of his old bands — Gorilla Biscuits, Youth Of Today, and Rival Schools, on top of Quicksand. It must feel weird to constantly relive multiple different past lives at the exact same time. The man has absolutely nothing to prove, but "Get To It" opens the new Quicksand record with an urgent and sincere call to live whatever life you have left, to seize any moment available to you. With its explosive churn, "Get To It" comes charged with the kind of anthemic energy that's currently turning festival fields into vast expanses of pogoing humanity.

He doesn't look like it, but Walter Schreifels is 57 years old. Plenty of his generational NYHC peers are no longer with us. Many of the songs on Bring On The Psychics, like the irresistible head-splitter "Cool Guy," are just about how the people around you are all jerks who need their behavior corrected, a time-honored hardcore song subject. Along with those songs, though, the album lays out plenty of anxiety about encroaching mortality and the precious, fleeting nature of time itself. One song is called "Regenerate." Another reminds us that "the days go by so fast." On "In Full Color," Schreifels goes into the philosopher zone: "Life can really pile up/ Before you know, you’ve got all this stuff/ Weighing down on your head/ Wish you were somewhere else instead/ Oh, wow." As someone who gets older every single day, I can relate. Oh, wow.

But Bring On The Psychics isn't sparse or haunted. We're not dealing with late-period Leonard Cohen here. Instead, Schreifels and his bandmates convey those getting-older feelings with sharp urgency. If their time is running out, they're going to make it count. With all his different bands, Schreifels continues to share stages with young, hungry hardcore bands, and you can hear their inspiration at work on Bring On The Psychics. Some tracks, like "Days You Run To," are among quietest and most reflective of Quicksand's entire discography. But plenty of others, "Cool Guy" included, are more direct and fired-up than anything that they've done since getting back together. Scheifels has said that the album is inspired by the music that he loved when he was a kid, in his pre-Quicksand days. And while I wouldn't call Bring On The Psychics a straight-up hardcore record, it's a lot closer than I could've expected.

Quicksand are great at capturing the immediacy of hardcore. That's important. Guitarist Tom Capone hasn't been in Quicksand since 2017, when he got arrested for shoplifting while on tour. Since then, Quicksand have operated as a three-piece, with Cave-In frontman Stephen Brodsky filling in live. On Bring On The Psychics, the rhythm section of Sergio Vega and drummer Alan Cage is completely dialed in with Schreifels, and Drug Church/Drain producer Jon Markson captures their attack with unfussy clarity. These songs were built to be played live. The album is short, punchy, and beautifully paced. Even on the few slower and prettier songs, the energy never flags.

Once upon a time, Quicksand were futurists who tried to push their scene out of a sonic rut. Now, they're playing around in the structure that they basically built. But Bring On The Psychics avoids all the pitfalls that can befall long-running bands, especially those that broke up and then got back together and stayed back together. There's a clear line between Bring On The Psychics and Quicksand's previous records, as well as Schreifels' past music with so many other projects, but they never get complacent, repeat themselves, or indulge in nostalgia. Instead, they sound newly refreshed, as if they're determined to rock as hard as they can while there's still breath in their lungs. Will Turnstile age that well? Will any of us age that well? We can only hope. Once again, Quicksand have set a blueprint.

Bring On The Psychics is out 7/17 on Equal Vision.

Other albums of note out this week:
• Steve Lacy's Oh Yeah?
• Syd's Beard
• Swapmeet's Mount Zero
• Brian Ennals & Blockhead's Boatshoes
• Sad13's 1331 mixtape
• Oxis' Oxis 9
• Fuming Mouth's The Ringing Bell
• Yard Act's You're Gonna Need A Little Music
• Helado Tropical’s Helado Tropical
• Lido Pimienta's Caribenya
• Gracie Abrams' Daughter From Hell
• The Menzingers' Everything I Ever Saw
• Lenny Kaye's Goin' Local
• Tricky's Different When It’s Silent
• Loathe's A Stranger To You
• Boundaries' Yearning: the unbeautiful after
• Larry June's WHO COPPIN
• Babe Rainbow's Acid And Honey
• Rome Streetz' Sock It 2 My Pocket
• Buju Banton's Too Too Bad
• Masego's Fix Your Face
• DJ Spanish Fly's Cadillac Warnings
• Radkey's Bedroom Sand
• Nao Yoshioka's Self
• Gary Stewart's One Track Mind
• Laggard's 7 Signs You're Dating A Narcissist
• O'Flynn's Kairos
• Waylon Wyatt's Dustpiles
• Andrew Yee's Trans Requiem
• NOVAREIGN’s Shifting The Axis Of The World
• Porcelain's Today's Minor Victories
• Gi Gi's In Lieu
• Her Head’s On Fire's Am I Not Your Girl?
• Albee Al's Thug’s Motivation
• Lily Meola's Lucky To Be
• Plume Girl & Home Baker's Every Day I Weave On The Great Loom
• Raq baby's Still Spillin
• Left To Die's Initium Mortis
• Aaron Lee Tasjan's Get Over It, Underdog
• The Black Drumset's Friends In Dark Places
• Sesame Street's Parody Party
• Max Subar's Anything Could Be
• Neon Moons' Day Late And A Dollar Short
• Lisa Molinaro's Blind Trust
• Daisy The Great's The Rubber Teeth Talk With Friends
• Taylor Bickett's Nothing I Can’t Undo
• Gangrene's Better Than McDonalds
• Niko Moon's Roots
• Lesley Mok's Transient
• Ferries' Eye Wander
• Banda AL9's Hey! Hey! We're Banda AL9
• Tiger Bear Wolf's Tiger Bear Wolf
• CR & The White Lights' My Old Self
• Day We Ran's Naked At Your Door
• Mock Media's Rat Bastard
• The Steve Bardwil Band's Stardust In Disguise
• Cinder Well's A Blooming Body
• Martin Luther McCoy's Welcome Back Love
• Parker Barrow's Hold The Mash
• Ranky Tanky’s This Village
• Aisha Vaughan's Water World
• Kingseeker's Eldritch Horrors
• Wynne Bennett's Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed Soundtrack
• Yes' Live At Roosevelt Stadium, Jersey City, 17 June 1976
• Fantastic Negrito's Fantastic Negrito Alive! live album
• New Order's The Best & The Rest Of’
• Ween’s 12 Golden Country Greats (30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition)
• The Waterboys' Atlantic Rain — The Lost Fisherman’s Blues Recordings
• Franklin's Go Kid Go [Remastered & Expanded]
• Dry Cleaning's Secret Love (Deluxe Edition)
• Pearly Drops' The Voices Are Coming Back (The Voices Became Louder Edition)
• Alex Lahey's B-Grade University (Reunion Edition)
• Zac Farro's Operator - Live In Studio
• Motionless In White's Decades
• Tesla's Homage
• Aaron Lewis' Give My Country Back
• deBasement's HARDBODY EP
• Flesh Creep's Glimmer EP
• Lightning Bug's In Between Things EP
• Trace Remains' Zero Hour EP
• IDEGO's IDEGO EP
• Cherry i's Yes, but I could never tell that lie EP
• Cry's AD 140 EP
• cyanotype's the urge becomes the trigger EP
• FAUZIA's I Was Here For A Moment EP
• DJ Manny & DJ Phil's Feature Presentation EP
• J'cuuzi's Recession Indicator & SLUDGEcontent EPs
• Little Dog Star's Something Infinite EP
• Nervous Surface & No Good With Secrets' split EP
• The Healing Power Of Horses' Summer Indoors (or outside wearing black) EP
• MEGGO's eavesdropper ;; the crash EP
• Izza's A Night At The Ballet: Act I EP