Second Harbour – Coalesce
Second Harbour – Coalesce
Sharptone Records
Release Date: 12/12/2025
Review by Jon Deaux
6/10 – existenial crisis
Two brothers from Canadian suburbia ask if you’d be happy dying tomorrow. Not in a cult way, more like a lifestyle audit set to palm-muted guitars. They have recruited a drummer who became “like family” and now all three are working through their issues in drop-D.
Xavier and Vincent Morency started due to blink-182 in middle school. Now they are making Post-Hardcore about toxic relatives and the apocalypse. That’s not growth, that’s just getting older with access to better recording equipment. Their band is called Second Harbour, which sounds vaguely nautical and means absolutely nothing.
Coalesce is their SHARPTONE debut, and it sounds expensive without sounding corporate. Producer Kyle Marchant found a way to retain the basement rawness while making it stream-ready. You hear the studio polish, but you can also hear the anger seething underneath, which is a lot harder to balance than you might think. It’s sonic distressed jeans that cost two hundred bucks.
‘Relative’ opens with the requisite Post-Hardcore chug that’s been law since at least 2003. There’s a hook in here with the word “consanguinity,” which is either brilliantly pretentious or pretentiously brilliant, I haven’t decided. Xavier describes it as a song about rough family dynamics, which is underselling it the way “Hiroshima had some structural damage” undersells things. It goes “There must be more to life than consanguinity / A living relative will be the death of me” and fuck if that doesn’t nail a specific kind of holiday dinner dread.
He says the relationship is forced because of blood, even though it doesn’t work. That’s half of all families and most Post-Hardcore lyrics since Fugazi hung it up. They wanted it deep and hard-hitting, which in band speak means screaming parts and a breakdown. Sometimes the old playbook still works, though.
‘Mourning Dove’ continues with the therapy session, coming from another angle – what happens when that toxic person finally dies and you’re left to wonder about the life that wasn’t. There’s this pre-chorus that speaks to growing wings only to have them ripped off. Vincent describes it as musically gorgeous with dark lyrics, seemingly completely oblivious that he just described the entire emo playbook. But he’s right. The clear fuzz hums under hypnotic verses, and it sounds pretty in that devastating way.
Xavier calls it a spiritual successor to ‘Relative,’ in which it tracks: “If the elder person passed, how would it affect the survivor?” Same family nightmare, different corpse. Pretty music, with darker subject matter underneath, that paints the picture for the whole EP, says Vincent.
This is the point where I am supposed to get snarky, mentioning how Thursday and Underoath have done it all before. Except Second Harbour isn’t trying to reinvent sadness-just three guys from some peaceful nowhere playing instruments together, trying to figure out what to do with their damage. The honesty is almost offensive in its forthrightness.
‘I Am Half-Sick of Shadows’ takes its title from Tennyson because apparently we’re quoting Victorian poetry now. John Muggianu on drums says it shows their scope—heavy but melodic with the breakdown and synths. What that says to me is: this sounds like literally every Post-Hardcore song recorded since 2004. Whatever, it probably rips live. I wouldn’t know. Too old, ears already damaged, kids too energetic.
The closer, also titled ‘Coalesce,’ is their first love song. After four tracks of family dysfunction and planetary extinction, they landed on “actually love might save us.” It’s either genuine growth or tonal whiplash. The vocal delivery is vulnerable without the usual performative quality, and you can tell the difference if you listen to enough of this genre.
Soft vocals layer between hazy chords. The promise goes “I know you’re scared, but I’m right here. And when we’re pulled apart Coalesce and restart again.” Xavier said they have wanted to write something like this since the band’s inception. Vincent said it wraps everything up, the beginnings and endings together. They both talk about their music in terms that make it sound like it matters to them, which would annoy me except you can hear it does.
The brothers insist they write “in an old school way with three people in the same room like a refined garage band.” That’s just how bands worked before ProTools made everyone lazy, but fine, in 2025 maybe that’s worth mentioning. Most records get assembled like IKEA furniture now – pieces recorded separately, hoping they eventually fit. There’s something to their immediacy. You can hear them actually occupying the same physical space.
They built this slowly through earlier releases. “The Right Shade of Red,” “Indifferent,” “A Fire In The Attic.” “The Most Dangerous Game” gathered 328K Spotify streams, a number that either seems massive or pathetic, depending on your perspective and pharmaceutical intake. SHARPTONE saw something there. Probably the same thing I see: Competent Post-Hardcore from guys who aren’t trying to change the world, just document their corner of it well enough to matter.
He wants you to find new meaning with repeat listens, like rewatching movies, but then that’s what every musician says about their work. Sometimes that is horseshit, and sometimes there really is depth. Second Harbour might’ve earned it, though: the songs have enough layers – vocal harmonies, buried guitar parts and lyrics that change meaning once you know where they’re going.
Whether the emotion you feel “belongs to you” is either profound generosity or the ultimate artistic cop-out, probably both. The music does what Post-Hardcore’s supposed to do: processes fear and anger and grief through volume and melody until something resembling catharsis emerges on the other side.
The apocalypse angle runs through everything: if the world exploded tomorrow, would you be content? It’s really a young person’s question. When you’re in your twenties, everything feels apocalyptic. You get older, and you realize that the world doesn’t end dramatically, it just keeps disappointing you in smaller and smaller increments until you die. Less cinematic, but more accurate.
Vincent describes it as being about the beginning of everything and the end of it all. Xavier chimes in to say they try to do as much as possible with the time they have. Standard interview fodder, for sure – but coming from guys who make music about mortality, it lands different. They appear really to mean it, rather than just filling word count.
The whole thing clocks in around twenty minutes. It’s not revolutionary, but nobody’s revolutionising Post-Hardcore anymore; we’re just seeing who can execute the familiar moves with enough conviction to justify the effort. Second Harbour clears that bar. The riffs work, the screaming works, the clean parts don’t feel like commercial compromise.
Does it soundtrack life like they claim? Feels like overselling twenty minutes about dying satisfied. But maybe for some kid in another bland suburb working through their own family nightmares, this is what they need. Music doesn’t have to be revolutionary to be useful. Sometimes it just needs to articulate the specific shape of your damage better than you can yourself.
I’ve had ‘Mourning Dove’ on repeat while writing this. Four times, maybe five. There’s something in the way it sounds expensive but stays angry, polished without being neutered. That’s probably what SHARPTONE recognized-these guys can exist within professional music spaces without sounding like they’re desperate to exist within professional music spaces.
Would the Morency brothers be satisfied if everything ended tomorrow? They say yes. Seems unlikely, but I respect the confidence. Would I be satisfied with Coalesce? It delivers catharsis through volume, processes damage into hooks, and sounds good enough to recommend without feeling like a sellout.
Three guys from nowhere, Canada, put together a Post-Hardcore EP about family and apocalypse. File it next to all the other Post-Hardcore EPs about family and apocalypse. Occasionally, it transcends that. Usually, it just does its job well. Still worth your twenty minutes though.
TRACKLISTING:
01. Relative
02. Mourning Dove
03. I Am Half-Sick Of Shadows
04. Coalesce
LINKS:
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