The Cincinnati Six-Piece Finds Clarity In Midwest Emo’s Tenderest Corners
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Sungaze have always carried a certain haze in their sound, but I’m No Longer Afraid of Heights feels like the moment the fog lifts and the view lands hard. The Cincinnati six-piece’s fourth album leans into Midwest emo with the kind of emotional precision that makes old memories sting a little differently. Here, nostalgia isn’t softened into sentiment. It’s inspected, measured, and held up to the light until the edges show.
Built around the songwriting core of Ivory Snow and Ian Hilvert, the record finds the band sounding more grounded and more direct than ever. Lush, textured guitars still swell and shimmer, but they’re anchored by clear vocals and a sense of lived-in weight. The result is a set of songs that move between survival, grief, ambition, and the uneasy business of staying put when part of you wants out. There’s a steady pulse of Midwest soil beneath it all, even when the arrangements reach for something bigger.
By the time the title track arrives, Sungaze have already spent 11 songs wrestling with grief, ambition, and belonging. Slide guitar drifts over acoustic guitar and drums like a summer afternoon remembered from a porch swing. The song begins in warmth, then slowly tightens. The first chorus lands with a resigned ache, and by the bridge, hesitation gives way to motion. It’s a fitting finale for a record concerned with learning how to move forward without abandoning the past.
That balance between memory and forward movement carries through the album’s visual language too. The video for I’m No Longer Afraid of Heights
folds childhood imagery, river water, and live performance into one symbolic release, set in a small Ohio town along the Little Miami. It’s a fitting frame for a band that knows how to turn private history into something communal without sanding off the details. As Ivory Snow puts it, “It was important to us to film the video in the real life settings that inspired it.”
Sungaze’s story gives the music extra resonance: a project shaped by loss, chance, and the strange alchemy of two people finding the exact missing piece in each other. Snow’s voice, Hilvert’s guitar work, and the full-band interplay with Angela Colvin, Charlie Hausfeld, Zach Starkie, and Tyler Collier make I’m No Longer Afraid of Heights feel cohesive in a way that’s rare and earned. For listeners drawn to the atmospheric pull of Mazzy Star and Slowdive, or the emotional snap of Title Fight and Beach Fossils, this one should land close to the bone.
Sungaze make music for people who feel deeply, don’t always fit, and still keep looking for beauty in the hard places. On I’m No Longer Afraid of Heights, they sound ready to meet that feeling without flinching.
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