Hold On Fire began during a cutscene from Final Fantasy XVI, which is not the traditional birthplace of a post-hardcore band unless the genre has quietly added a summon gauge.
Founding member Jon contacted Joe and Jeremy that same night. A few days later, he approached Fred Mascherino after an acoustic show and booked studio time eight weeks out, despite the small complication that the band did not have a complete lineup yet.
On paper, that sounds like a very efficient way to manufacture panic. On Half Alive, it sounds more like five musicians refusing to wait until the idea became sensible. Jon later described the original goal in remarkably unglamorous terms: “All I wanted was to create something that felt honest.”
Released July 6, the debut EP packs five songs into 17 minutes. It was produced by Mascherino, known for Taking Back Sunday and The Color Fred, alongside Stephen Angello, and it includes a guest appearance from Story of the Year vocalist Dan Marsala. It is also reportedly the first of two planned EPs, meaning Hold On Fire have treated their debut less like a completed monument and more like the first door they managed to kick open.
Influence without taxidermy
There is no pretending that Half Alive arrived untouched by the post-hardcore records of the 2000s.
The guitars surge in familiar places. The choruses arrive ready for a room full of people to shout them back. Vulnerable lyrics are carried by instrumentals that frequently sound more energized than the person singing them feels. Marsala’s appearance on “Dead and Spent” makes the lineage even easier to identify.
That familiarity is both the EP’s clearest strength and its most obvious risk.
Hold On Fire occasionally hug their influences tightly enough to leave fingerprints. A few turns feel inherited rather than genuinely surprising, and listeners who spent the MySpace years collecting Victory Records samplers will rarely be confused about which emotional neighborhood they have entered.
Fortunately, Half Alive understands the difference between influence and taxidermy. This is not a dead genre posed under flattering museum lights. The songs move with enough urgency, and the writing feels personal enough, that the familiar structure becomes an entry point rather than the entire reason for being there.
“Can I Find My Way Out of the Dark” opens the EP in motion, pairing emotional disorientation with an instrumental that refuses to sit down and wallow beside it. “Like a Ghost” moves deeper into grief, while “Dead and Spent” becomes the obvious center of gravity without allowing its guest vocalist to turn the track into Story of the Year karaoke.
The back half begins pulling itself toward something sturdier. “Even Legends Fall” acknowledges that strength and collapse can occupy the same body, while “Brand New Eyes” closes the record by choosing forward movement over a magically tidy resolution. Another review of the EP traces that same progression through uncertainty, loss, resilience, and renewal, but the important part is that Hold On Fire make the transition feel earned rather than simply arranging the songs from saddest to least sad.
“We’re friends first”
The most revealing explanation of Half Alive may have very little to do with genre.
During Hold On Fire’s conversation with Radio Garden State, the band described the writing process as something that expanded beyond its original plan:
“It became such a collaborative thing. That’s the fun of it… We’re all respectful to each other, and we’re friends first.”
“Friends first” could sound suspiciously soft in an industry where bands occasionally communicate through subtweets, separate dressing rooms, and increasingly specific statements from former bassists.
Here, it explains why the EP feels coherent despite the number of hands involved.
Mascherino and Angello help give the record a polished, immediate sound, but it never feels scrubbed clean of personality. Marsala enters “Dead and Spent” as part of the song rather than a celebrity sticker slapped across the front. The guitars, vocals, and rhythm section are allowed to react to one another instead of competing for whichever instrument can occupy the most emotional square footage.
Collaboration is not treated as five people politely taking turns. It is the actual mechanism of the record.
That matters because Half Alive is openly built from music its members already love. A weaker version of this EP could have become an immaculate reconstruction of someone else’s youth. Instead, the shared history gives Hold On Fire a vocabulary, and the friendships give them enough trust to speak through it without every member dragging the song toward a separate favorite band.
The result is nostalgic, certainly. But it is nostalgia with circulation.
The verdict
Half Alive does not reinvent post-hardcore, and it does not need to pretend that it does.
Its references are visible. Some of its emotional language and musical architecture will feel immediately familiar to anyone who once arranged their profile song with the seriousness of a funeral director. The EP could push further into the stranger corners of the band’s identity, particularly now that the first record has established what they can do well.
What it does offer is a sharply edited debut with strong hooks, genuine emotional movement, and almost no wasted space. Seventeen minutes is long enough to introduce the band without forcing the listener through a ceremonial acoustic reprise, three unnecessary interludes, and a voicemail someone should have deleted privately.
More importantly, the record sounds committed.
Hold On Fire booked the studio before the band was complete. They assembled the lineup around an idea, opened the process to collaboration, and made a debut that celebrates its influences without asking those influences to do all the work.
Half Alive may be named for incompleteness, but it does not sound tentative.
And with a second EP reportedly still ahead, Hold On Fire have created the useful kind of debut problem: now they have to prove the other half can hit harder.
Stream Half Alive now, watch the full Radio Garden State conversation, and follow Hold On Fire’s official links for new releases and upcoming shows.