Casey released their debut album, Love Is Not Enough, on 23 September 2016. It fused furious hardcore with atmospheric guitar textures, dynamic-driven structures, and even clean singing, but it all served its centrepiece: sorrow. The band created the musical embodiment of emotions stacked upon emotions stacked upon emotions. Their methods of harnessing sadness have already shaped generations of groups, both within and outside hardcore. Ten years on, its impact is still felt.
In 2013, Tom Weaver, guitarist for Welsh metalcore band Continents, was hospitalised before a performance in Germany. He was already burnt out on touring, and this was the nail in the coffin. Back home and bandless, he was contacted by his childhood best friend, Liam Torrence. Torrence’s band Hot Damn had recently disbanded, and he suggested they write music together. Weaver would be vocalist, Torrence would be guitarist, and it would be a studio-only project. They called themselves Well Wisher and decided they would play melodic hardcore.
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, the UK was in the midst of a golden age of melodic hardcore, fronted by Landscapes, More Than Life and Dead Swans. Unlike many other countries, British hardcore had not yet disconnected from its scene; metalcore bands like Bring Me the Horizon or Architects, and even tours by foreign scenesters like Attack Attack! featured melodic hardcore support acts.
It soon infected everything in metalcore, from the sing-scream metallic hardcore and nu-metal grooves of Create to Inspire, While She Sleeps, or Muise-era Vanna’s “puke rock” to the progressive noodling of Napoleon. Architects had even shifted into the genre on The Here and Now (2011) and retained its influence through to Lost Forever // Lost Together (2014). Then, there was Heart in Hand, Counterparts and Hundredth, so-called “srscore“; merging the genre with the emotional metalcore style of Misery Signals, Hopesfall and Shai Hulud.
“We were thinking of bands in the vein of Counterparts, Hundredth,” says Weaver of Well Wisher’s unreleased srscore demo. While happy with the songs, they still weren’t the melodic hardcore style he wanted. Weaver grew interested in a loose collective of American bands called the Wave, and the British groups they inspired, including Landscapes and the Elijah. Wave members Pianos Become the Teeth, Touché Amoré, La Dispute and Defeater were taking Comadre’s fusion of melodic hardcore and screamo, and incorporating the ambience and dynamic structures of post-rock bands like This Will Destroy You and Caspian.
“A lot of my music at that time would have come from blog sites like Sophie’s Floorboard,” says Weaver. “I remember Old Pride being my entry point to Pianos Become the Teeth, and it was unlike anything I’d heard prior.” Weaver contacted Toby Evans, a guitarist he knew had brought post-rock tendencies to his band Our Tomorrow. “In December 2013, I’d shared a demo with him from Well Wisher, and he offered to join,” Weaver continues, “the conversation naturally turned to, ‘I bet this would sound cool in a practice room with a band’.”
In the following months they reshaped their sound and expanded to a five-piece. Stripping away any metal influence, their songs now relied on heavily textured, atmospheric guitars; sparse, building drums; and the emotional soft-loud dynamics of Evans’ favourites. It was a supergroup of sorts, made of those whom Weaver viewed as the best available songwriters from across the South Wales music scene.
Drummer Max Nicolai had been in Here Lies the Enemy and bassist Scott Edwards had been in the Dead Wretched and Boys with X-Ray Eyes. In the process, Well Wisher changed their name to Casey, expressly to be “genre-agnostic”, a reference to both Rise of Science’s album Casey and late Hawthorne Heights guitarist Casey Calvert.
After a series of singles and an EP, they began work on their debut album, Love Is Not Enough, in the summer of 2015. They knew it would feature some previously released material, namely a reworked version of their first single “Haze”. Its B-side, “Ghost”, never re-emerged and is now mostly forgotten. “I’m not sure Casey ever wrote a demo that didn’t end up being a full song,” says Weaver. “I’m not entirely sure why we ended up dropping ‘Ghost’, to be honest. In hindsight, it’s no different sonically to some of the other work on LINE.”
A core part of the Wave had been its hyper-literate, emotional, lyric-forward form. Its founders had treasured mewithoutYou, a group whose instrumentals trudged along as if solely to accommodate lyrics. In response, The Wave covered constructed universes, family sagas and modernist monologues, especially through the use of spoken word. Weaver wished to continue this.
Love Is Not Enough is closer to a concept album than many attributed that title. It focuses on how love alone is not a cure for mental ill-health. Much of its tracklist focuses on a breakup Weaver experienced immediately before recording the album. “I think it’s natural to draw inspiration from situations that have made you feel deeply,” says Weaver. “With the exception of [2024’s] ‘Sanctimonious’, every Casey song is grounded in truth. There have definitely been embellishments along the way.”
Weaver crafted a confessional, ultra-specific lyric style that rarely has end-stopped phrases like most songwriters. Instead, he uses enjambment for much of a verse, which he compares to essays. Motifs recur and are reinterpreted with the passing of time.
Take the “Haze”-originated dichotomy between house and home with “Now the home we made is nothing more than a house where we fucked, and we ate but never fell in love”. There, it couples with the subtler dichotomy of the shallow “fuck” against the passion of the implied “make love”. It echoes into “Little Bird” with “There was silence in the house / the hallways echoed with a growing doubt… I guess that’s why it never felt like home / because we’d lay together but we’re still alone”; then “Mourning” with “Senseless, I’ve been caring for the house that we called home.”
Many songs use overt extended metaphors such as “Mourning’s” “It never felt like we were laying together sleeping / Only that my broken body had been crushed between your sheets / Like dead flowers between the pages of a journal you never read anymore / You just flick through when you’re bored.” In this respect, its centrepiece is “Little Bird”, a metaphor of a bird as a lover: “I thought my heart could be our home / but all you thought of was a cage… you were my little bird, and I saw fit to clip your wings / and then resented you, because of me, you never chose to sing.”
“Lyrics always come last… I’ll wait for the music to be done to make sure that whatever pieces I commit to it are permanent,” says Weaver. “I’ll rarely start at the beginning. I’ll typically settle on a statement I really like, and then I’ll think, ‘How do I arrive at this? Where should I go from here?’ and then write outwards in both directions.”
Weaver’s interest in writing began in his teens. When he started year nine at school, his English teacher assigned a short story about what happened during the summer break. Weaver’s submission was half-hearted. “It was just a heinously lazy piece of writing; I think I wrote the word ‘nice’ about 19 times,” he says. “Mr Davies handed back the work the following day with a 0 on it and a thesaurus.”
The teacher told Weaver that if he wrote “nice” in any future submission, he would fail. A restraint in place, Weaver developed a more critical eye. “That started me down the rabbit hole of expanding my vocabulary and incorporating more complex language,” he continues, “I always turn to Dessa, Sylvia Plath, Aaron Weiss, and Susan Sontag.”
A major addition that differentiated Casey from the Wave was clean singing alongside the usual screams. For them, this was a passive decision; its members had formed their first bands under the pop screamo of Funeral for a Friend and Hawthorne Heights, where emo-pop-punk’s singing sat right alongside screams. Even Continents made use of both on occasion.
“I think there’s something to be said for active versus passive influence. To be influenced by something doesn’t always mean to incorporate its mannerisms into your own work directly,” says Weaver. “The style of vocal has always been dictated by the music it’s being laid over. I don’t think screaming would have added anything to the points where I’m not already screaming.”
Unlike their first-loves’ formulaic switches between styles, Casey used harsh vocals for emotional peaks, mirroring post-rock’s instrumental crescendos. Weaver’s upper-mid register fry scream leaned into his modal voice, capturing desperate melodies. His enunciation ensured his lyrics were never misheard. Singing was often for the intimate moments, soft and almost spoken, like in confession. In the few moments of sung vocals during a climax, the melodies soared, a moment of uplifting hope in the otherwise helpless tone.
“It was just a melting pot of our listening habits,” says Weaver. “I loved both Landscapes records, and Love Let Me Go [by More Than Life] was a big record for me too, but definitely not so much for Toby. I love bands like My Bloody Valentine, but also newer gaze-style bands like A Place to Bury Strangers and the Pains of Being Pure at Heart.“
Casey’s time in the studio was scattered and chaotic. The members were rarely in the same room, split between Monnow Valley and Terra Firma Studios. “We definitely had sessions where a few of us were present at once, but Toby more so than anyone else,” says Weaver, “things were pieced together in fragments when we had time available.”
They had intended for the album to be mixed by Evans, who had done so for all the band’s earlier releases. However, he was burdened by the workload and nights spent sleeping in the studio. Evans had never mixed a full-length album before, and his perfectionism disrupted their time constraints.
Meanwhile, Casey’s friend and manager Mike McGough, singer/guitarist for Being as an Ocean and the Elijah, was working with Matt McClellan at Glow in the Dark Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. McGough pulled a few strings and squeezed time into McClellan’s schedule to mix Casey’s album. In gratitude, Casey asked McGough to feature on a track. His voice worked its way onto the second half of the song “Ceremony”, on the condition that it would be unlisted.
Love Is Not Enough was recorded between August and October 2015, but didn’t see release until September 2016. During this time, Casey were struck by their first lineup change. “Scott had let us know he was leaving,” says Weaver. Edwards’ final tour with the band was in March 2016 with Alazka. His bass duties were taken up by their long-time friend Adam Smith, guitarist in This Concept, who had already filled in for both Edwards and Evans. Love Is Not Enough became a time capsule.
In the years that followed, countless bands internationally replicated its sound. This was mostly centred on the promotional YouTube channel Dreambound, including Vacant Home, Wilderness and Selfworth. It worked its way into Numb Blood and early the Escape Artist’s soft grunge and back into srscore with Bloom and Witness. Casey released one more record, Where I Go When I Am Sleeping (2018), then disbanded the next year. It marking the end of an era, and most Dreambound bands shifted to other sounds.
Even then, Casey’s legacy did not die. Hell Hotel, Delair the Liar, and Static Dress adopted their atmospheric textures, incorporating them into a more accessible style closer to the pop screamo bands that had sparked Casey’s members’ love for cathartic music. Heavier, metal-inspired acts Currents, Backroads UK, and Earth & Elsewhere adopted their methods of harnessing emotion. In December 2022, Casey announced their reformation. Their long-awaited third album was released just two years ago. Musically, it’s softer; Weaver rarely screams. Their emotion is intact, but it’s less volatile and more contemplative. More hopeful.