For a band that spent eight and a half years working in near total anonymity, Autumn Kings have chosen an unusually fitting title for their Hopeless Records debut. Epiphanies, out September 18th, isn’t a record built around one big turning point. It’s eleven songs about the smaller ones, the moments where a person finally admits what they’ve been avoiding.
Jake Diab and Joe Millio started this band in the break room of a Windsor-area grocery store back in 2013, and for most of the years since, they were doing everything themselves: booking shows, managing the band, handling their own publicity. That grind shows up all over this record, not as a talking point but as texture. These are songs written by two guys who know what it’s like to keep showing up to something that isn’t paying off yet.
The album opens with “Sleep When I’m Dead,” a defiant, chest-out statement of purpose that sets the tone early. It’s the sound of a band refusing to be counted out, which makes sense given the band’s own account of how long they waited to be noticed. “Hellbound” follows, and it’s a different animal entirely, an anxious, spiraling look at a mind that won’t quiet down. Diab has talked about wanting to cut through the tendency in rock music to romanticize suffering, and “Hellbound” threads that needle. It doesn’t wallow. It names the spiral and then fights its way out of it.
“yOunG BLoOds,” featuring Howard Jones, is the record’s most confrontational moment, a rap-metal hybrid built for a mosh pit rather than a chorus singalong. It’s a sharp turn from the introspection surrounding it, and that contrast is clearly intentional. Diab and Millio have said they wanted this record to move between genres rather than settle into one lane, and this track is where that ambition is most obvious.
“Become Numb” might be the emotional center of the album. Where a lot of the record’s other songs eventually find a way out, this one sits in the feeling instead. Diab has described it as the song where they didn’t flip into a redemption arc, and that’s exactly what makes it land. It’s about the specific kind of paralysis that comes from knowing something is wrong and still not being able to move. Musically, the band pulled from Arctic Monkeys for the anticlimactic build of the chorus, and it works. There’s real restraint in a song that could have easily gone bigger and louder.
“Snake Charmer” swings hard in the opposite direction, a vicious, unambiguous kiss-off to someone who deceived them. “Tongue Tied” digs into something quieter and more personal, the fear of speaking up when it actually matters, including a line about the pressure to abandon music for a more stable path. Given what Diab has said in interviews about resisting a return to a conventional career, it reads as one of the more directly autobiographical songs on the record.
“Help Myself” closes the album on a note of resolve rather than resolution, less a triumphant ending than a decision to keep fighting. And “Gone, Gone, Gone,” the song that gave the band its first Top 10 radio hit, sits comfortably alongside the newer material rather than feeling like a leftover single tacked on for streaming numbers.
What holds Epiphanies together isn’t a shared sound. It’s a shared honesty. Diab has said the band deliberately avoided manufacturing a tragic backstory, that they grew up with a stable, unremarkable upbringing and didn’t have some singular trauma to build a narrative around. Instead, what they’re drawing on here is something less dramatic and, frankly, more relatable: the slow accumulation of self-doubt, industry politics, and the specific exhaustion of doing the same work for years with no guarantee it will ever pay off.
There’s also a maturity in the writing that separates this from the band’s earlier work. Diab has talked about how their first records were written by 18 and 19 year olds without much real-world experience to pull from. Epiphanies doesn’t have that problem. Every song here sounds like it came from someone who actually lived through what they’re describing.
Sonically, the band leans on their usual big riffs and melodic hooks, but there’s more genre-hopping than past releases, funk and ska textures woven into otherwise straightforward rock arrangements, and a willingness to let a song like “yOunG BLoOds” go somewhere entirely different from a song like “Become Numb.” It’s a record that trusts the listener to follow it through those shifts rather than smoothing them out for consistency’s sake.
Epiphanies is the sound of a band that finally has the perspective to look back at years of grinding without needing to dress it up. It doesn’t reach for easy inspiration and it doesn’t wallow in misery either. It just tells the truth about what it takes to get somewhere, and that’s rarer than it should be in modern rock.
Epiphanies drops September 18th via Hopeless Records. Pre-order is available now.
I’m Drew, the founder and editor of Front of the Stage. I have a strong love for music and photography, which started at a very young age. There’s just something I love about experiencing live music and capturing memories that will last a lifetime, and that’s how Front of the Stage came to be.
