Some records capture a moment. Others only really begin to make sense once enough time has passed to understand the person who survived it. From Under Concrete Kings’ Impulse Tension feels very much like the latter.
I’ve known Joseph Izayea for a few years now. We first crossed paths back in 2021 around Harder Truths, caught up again for Seeking Sirens and Departing Ways, and then again with Sour Times in 2023. Across those conversations I’ve heard Joseph talk about anger, betrayal, creativity, friendship, work, determination and his almost ridiculous ability to keep a dozen musical plates spinning at once.
That history made reconnecting around Impulse Tension feel different. Some of what sits inside this four track EP feels familiar, but Joseph doesn’t. Not completely, anyway. The anger is still there, the hurt is still there, and there are moments of genuine disgust and grief buried inside these songs. From Under Concrete Kings certainly haven’t traded brutality for some peaceful voyage into self discovery either. This thing still fucking hits.
What has changed is where Joseph seems to be standing while looking at everything that inspired it. Impulse Tension isn’t simply about what somebody else did. It is about what happens when you finally stop needing them to explain it.
YOU DON’T NEED EVERY ANSWER
There is a word Joseph used repeatedly throughout our conversation that unlocks a lot of this record: rumination.
It is that cycle where the mind refuses to leave something alone because there has to be an explanation somewhere. Why did this happen? Why would somebody do that? How could somebody you trusted turn out to be something completely different? Eventually the search for an answer becomes its own trap because sometimes there isn’t an explanation that is ever going to satisfy you.
That is where Impulse Tension starts moving beyond anger and into something much more interesting: radical acceptance. Not forgiveness for the sake of pretending something didn’t hurt, not excusing another person’s behaviour, and not pretending everything happens for some magical fucking reason. It is simply accepting that this is what happened.
Joseph doesn’t need everything that happened to make sense anymore. It needs to make sense enough for him to decide what he does next, and while that might sound simple written down, actually doing it is something completely different.
There were parts of Joseph’s life where people and relationships he believed were foundational turned out not to be what he thought they were. When enough of those foundations disappear at once, you don’t simply lose other people. You start questioning your own reality.
That is where Impulse Tension becomes less a record about betrayal and more a record about reconstruction.
ANEW FROM BONES
The title “Anew From Bones” says almost everything you need to know. Sometimes rebuilding doesn’t mean returning to the person you were before everything went wrong. Sometimes that person is gone.
There was something Joseph said during our conversation that stuck with me. He talked about the person he had been several years ago with genuine affection. That version of himself was a good bloke, and he liked him, but he also knows that person isn’t coming back.
That could be an incredibly bleak realisation, yet instead it sits at the heart of what makes “Anew From Bones” unexpectedly hopeful. The old version disappearing doesn’t mean the next version has to be worse.
Joseph compared it to planting a seed. You can be left with almost nothing, throw that tiny piece into the ground, give it what it needs and somehow roots eventually start appearing, followed by leaves and then life.
That imagery fits beautifully against the musical relationship at the centre of From Under Concrete Kings. Josh Previte had essentially built the instrumental foundations of the four tracks before Joseph added the vocals and lyrics. Rather than arriving with a complete lyrical concept and asking the band to soundtrack it, Joseph reacted to what Josh had already created and found different pieces of himself inside the music.
It is another reason their partnership continues to work. Josh doesn’t necessarily need Joseph to explain every detail of where his head is. Sometimes he can simply hand him the music and let Joseph find the wound inside it.
Longtime producer and friend Chris Daniele had a considerably more direct way of summing up the spirit behind “Anew From Bones” when he said, “There’s only up from rock bottom, bitch.”
Fair enough. I’m not sure I can improve on that.
THE PERSON IN THE MIRROR
The further you get into Impulse Tension, the more complicated the perspective becomes. “A Mirror’s Loathing” doesn’t just point outward, and that is important.
It is easy to write a song saying somebody else was awful. It is considerably harder to look at why you believed what you believed, what you projected onto somebody and what warning signs you might have ignored because the version of reality in front of you felt better.
A mirror doesn’t decide what it reflects, but people decide what they are willing to see. There is anger in that realisation, but talking with Joseph now, there is something else mixed into it as well: pity.
You can eventually walk away from somebody else’s constructed reflection. They can’t.
That doesn’t mean Joseph has arrived at some perfect enlightened state where everything is forgiven and everyone joins hands around the campfire. Listen to “Obfuscation” and that theory lasts approximately five seconds.
That track is fucking vicious.
Where other parts of the EP allow reflection and melody to breathe, “Obfuscation” feels like someone locking the exit and letting the chaos take over. Joseph wrote more than half of it during the drive to the studio because he had been fighting against what he actually wanted to say.
Eventually he stopped trying to dress the emotion up as something more respectable. Fuck it. Go low. And he did.
There is something valuable about that existing on the same record as all the language around acceptance and empathy. Growth doesn’t mean sanitising every ugly emotion, and sometimes being genuinely angry is appropriate. The difference is whether you carry that anger everywhere once the moment has passed.
That seems to be one of the biggest changes in Joseph over the years I’ve known him. He has learned how to feel something without allowing that feeling to permanently become part of his identity. He can walk into the studio, drag the emotion into the light, tear the absolute shit out of it vocally and then leave knowing it doesn’t have to come home with him.
WHAT DID I ACTUALLY LOSE?
“Covert Cadaver” might contain the most uncomfortable question on the entire EP: what happens when you are grieving something and eventually begin wondering what you actually lost?
Not who. What.
There is a particular cruelty in discovering that the relationship, friendship, future or version of another person you are mourning might not have existed in the way you believed it did. The grief is still real and your experience of losing it is still real, but suddenly the object of that grief becomes harder to define.
Joseph doesn’t pretend Impulse Tension solved that equation. What changed was the questions.
What did I really lose? Why was I holding onto it? Where should that energy go now? What do I actually deserve from the people around me?
There are probably no perfect answers to any of those, but asking better questions is still progress. Maybe that is one of the most human things about this record.
There is no triumphant final scene where Joseph announces that he has completely figured himself out. He hasn’t. None of us fucking have. There is simply movement, and sometimes movement is enough.
EMPATHY WITH BOUNDARIES
That also feeds into another idea running through Impulse Tension: compassionate empathy.
Understanding somebody doesn’t require giving them unlimited access to your life, and that distinction matters. It is possible to understand that another person’s behaviour comes from their own damage, insecurities or experiences while still deciding that their behaviour isn’t acceptable around you.
Compassion doesn’t require becoming somebody’s punching bag. Empathy doesn’t mean abandoning boundaries, and understanding why somebody hurt you doesn’t magically make the hurt disappear.
Joseph’s perspective now feels considerably less concerned with punishing someone else and much more concerned with making sure the experience doesn’t determine who he becomes next. That includes extending some of that compassion toward himself.
Forgiving yourself for trusting the wrong person, ignoring something you should have seen, being angry or making a decision with the information you had at the time is part of that process. There is a huge difference between accountability and spending the rest of your life beating the shit out of yourself mentally.
Joseph has learned that difference the hard way.
FROM UNDER CONCRETE KINGS STILL HAVE TEETH
All of this emotional weight would mean very little if the music underneath it couldn’t carry it. Fortunately, From Under Concrete Kings remain fucking heavy.
Josh Previte continues to provide an instrumental framework capable of moving between technical punishment, groove, melody and outright chaos without making the songs feel like collections of riffs glued together. Joseph sounds equally comfortable dropping into the ugliest corners of his vocal range or letting melody give the songs another emotional colour.
Eric Sheppard and Alicia Marinelli round out a version of From Under Concrete Kings that feels increasingly like something with an identity beyond its beginnings as a recording collaboration, while Chris Daniele’s fingerprints remain across the production side of the record through a relationship with Joseph that now stretches well beyond a decade.
Joseph describes Chris as someone who understands when he can do better, but equally importantly understands when he needs to stop trying to improve something that is already fucking good. That kind of trust can’t be manufactured in a studio session. It is earned over years.
The same can probably be said about Joseph and Josh. With so much of Impulse Tension dealing with relationships that weren’t what Joseph believed them to be, there is something fitting about the record simultaneously being built around creative relationships that have actually endured.
SUCCESS LOOKS DIFFERENT FROM HERE
Years ago Joseph told me something I’ve remembered ever since. He wasn’t necessarily chasing the traditional idea of making it. His goal was to eventually become some old bastard with a massive white beard who could look back over his life and say, “I did some cool shit.”
I threw that line back at him during this conversation and he genuinely didn’t expect me to remember it, but I did because I always thought it was a pretty fucking healthy definition of success.
Joseph has released records across multiple projects, worked with musicians whose records he once listened to as a fan, made ambitious videos on independent budgets and developed creative relationships that have lasted years. He has also built friendships with people scattered across different corners of the world.
There are plenty of musicians who would look at that list and recognise success, and Joseph increasingly does too.
Would he love to make a living touring the world and singing every night? Of course. But the absence of that doesn’t invalidate everything he has already created.
That shift in perspective ties straight back into Impulse Tension. Your life doesn’t have to look like the version you once imagined for it to still be worth living. Sometimes the imagined future disappears.
You build another one.
AND THEN THERE’S BLEED LIKE MYLEE…
Of course, after spending a sizeable portion of our conversation unpacking trauma, identity, forgiveness and the nature of human empathy, Joseph and I eventually ended up exactly where any serious philosophical discussion should finish: Jean Claude Van Damme.
Bleed Like Mylee remain one of my favourite examples of what happens when mates take an incredibly stupid idea far too seriously and accidentally make something fucking awesome. The entire project grew from their love of Kickboxer, eventually becoming Nuk Soo Kow and one of the most gloriously committed joke concepts I’ve encountered.
So naturally I asked Joseph which Van Damme movie he would attack if they ever did it again.
His first thought was Street Fighter.
Nothing is officially happening, and there is no Bleed Like Mylee Part Two announcement hiding inside this feature, but by the time we finished talking Joseph was already entertaining the possibility, considering who he could drag into it and blaming me for putting the idea into his head.
I’m completely comfortable with that. If a Street Fighter inspired Bleed Like Mylee record eventually appears, I’ll take my tiny piece of responsibility.
Because beneath all the emotional weight of Impulse Tension, that part of Joseph hasn’t disappeared either. The bloke still wants to make cool shit.
Maybe that is the point.
The person you were can disappear without everything good about them disappearing too. Impulse Tension doesn’t sound like Joseph Izayea returning to who he used to be. It sounds like somebody deciding what parts are worth carrying forward.
The anger stays when it has something useful to say. The lessons stay. The music stays. The people who genuinely show up stay.
Everything else can remain behind.
From rock bottom, there’s only up.
From Under Concrete Kings’ Impulse Tension is out now through Do Work Productions. Watch my full conversation with Joseph Izayea alongside this feature, then go give the EP a proper spin, preferably loud enough that the neighbours don’t get a choice.
**FROM UNDER CONCRETE KINGS is: **
- Joseph Izayea — lyrics, vocals
- Josh Previte — bass, guitar, vocals
- Eric Sheppard — drums
- Alicia Marinelli — guitar
Connect with FROM UNDER CONCRETE KINGS:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fromunderconcretekings
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@DoWork
- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/7pPpqGoziXMXhiX2sNVnaC?si=ri-76X_4QiKCaqEaNZ_shg
- Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/from-under-concrete-kings/1442081240
- TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@joey_dangerously
