Underneath, the second full-length record from Long Island indie rock outfit Calicoco, tracks frontperson Giana Caliolo’s bare-knuckle fight against their own brain. Opener “I Hate Living With Me” serves as the walk out music, a tinny, muffled march of drums and bass before a switch flips and the rhythm section pounds into jarring clarity with burnt-out surf guitars and a reverb-laden plea on a haunted house-melody: “Take me back, please take me/I know there’s something wrong with me.”

This is the opening round, a rickety minecart hurtling deep into Caliolo’s self. The record’s nine songs oscillate between calm and fitful, depressed and anxious, sunny and hurricane-force stormy. Throughout, Caliolo channels the National’s reverent, spacious soundscaping alongside the brash pop-punk glee of PUP and illuminati hotties. Vocal melodies meander between saccharin pop earworm and acerbic post-punk drawl, carving space over the musical cacophony. Caliolo played drums and guitar on the record, matching the two in an emotional lockstep that conveys the narrative of Underneath as clearly as Caliolo’s words.

“Underneath ties the meaning of all of these songs together for me,” says Caliolo. “This record is a lot of the discomfort of living in my own skin.”

Caliolo recorded in Rochester in January 2020 with friends Stephen Roessner and Phil Shaw. Caliolo, Shaw, and Roessner shared production duties, and Roessner handled engineering, mixing, and mastering. Surrounded by supports and community in Rochester, Caliolo dug deep for what would become the undressed honesty and painful volatility that color Underneath with such intense directness.

Caliolo explains that writing and recording the LP followed an intense breakup that forced introspection and loneliness, describing it as a period of pain, guilt, internal conflict, and longing to go back in time. “I really had a hard time living with myself,” they say. “I definitely had moments of not wanting to be here.”

Creating Underneath was a process of reining in and analyzing this period. “I was trying to get the chaos of my brain into something,” says Caliolo. “It was painful but it was also really important for sitting in my own skin.”

Following the steam-engine chug of “I Hate Living With Me” is “Strangers,” stirring to life under garbled, hazy guitars and a bleary drum beat before the switch flips again. A pogo stick-rhythm and crunchy guitars hijack the song halfway through, with Caliolo a passenger along for the ride: “Can you see it hovering over me? It feels like something took me you see/It feels like I’ve crossed over!”

This Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole quality is what makes Underneath such a striking representation of mental health and its precarity: one minute communicates an in-bed-all-day grey, while the next punches through it with a manic, noisy technicolor explosion of melody and rhythm. “I feel like this was the only way for me to express a lot of explosion in my brain,” Caliolo laughs. “Underneath,” which is hurried along on steady, spiralling drum thumps, makes this clear, with Caliolo singing a clear-eyed melody before droning below it: “I’ve lost control I’ve lost all my control.”

“Cuore Mio” bisects the record with calm and elegiac energy, a fog of synth and layered, harmonized vocal chanting. “Melancholy” follows with wide-open piano and palm-muted guitar building to a hopeful, ecstatic crescendo as Caliolo shouts, “Make me something I can feel again!” “Haunting” veers into driving desert-rock majesty, while closer “I Was The Devil,” retooled from an acoustic version on Calicoco’s 2019 EP Remnant, tucks Caliolo’s vocals atop thick, smeared-glitter synths and gentle drum triggers. It’s a bittersweet, thoughtful close: “I just loved you so/I didn’t know how to tell you I couldn’t do it anymore.”

Caliolo’s last words on the record are, “I made you hurt, I’m sorry for it all.” Though the words read as an apology directed outward, it's just as likely directed back in, a statement of reconciliation with the self.

Caliolo says that at first, they didn’t want to revisit or play the songs on Underneath. But now, that’s changed. “I’ve grown and taken some really intense steps to get better and healthier,” they say. “I’m at a point where it feels good again.”

bio written by Luke Ottenhof