Houston

Not everything survives. Winters on northern Minnesota’s Iron Range can be particularly harmful to your health — both mental and physical. Lane Soderberg and Jeff Halland grew up there, taking their lumps in youth hockey before turning their aggression on their guitars. This was the ‘90s, those halcyon days of handmade flyers and house shows, and eventually Soderberg and Halland moved down to Minneapolis, connecting with drummer Ian Prince to form Houston.

At its core, Houston’s sound is heavy, but not precisely thick. Jagged and angular in places, but not math-y or precious. It seems to come from the same dark-edged universe as fellow ‘90s acts Jawbox and Shiner, with fuzz-flecked guitars that grind and growl against muscular bass and drums. But the sound is also cut through with sonic experimentation, with unexpected clean or acidic textures. It’s like somehow they’ve taken their own route into the same sun-baked territory that created Queens of the Stone Age — a reminder that the frozen tundra is its own kind of desert and the cold can blister and peel just as harshly as the heat.

But not everything survives. After four albums and too much time in a cramped van together, the band splintered in 2004 with no plans for the future. It looked for all the world like Houston were going the way of so many young bands, burning out instead of fading away.

Turns out, fate had other plans. Almost two decades later, a chance meeting between Prince and Halland at IKEA — of all the dad rock places to bump into each other — sparked a revelation: In the intervening years, everyone had grown up a bit, and they were ready to come back and give it another shot. COVID-19 might have slowed it down, but nothing was going to stop the reunion that produced Houston’s first album in 20 years, The Biggest Shove in Space.

From the Germanium stomp of “DntUWry” to the buzzsaw slash of “AKThndrFk,” Houston show they didn’t have to shake off any rust to hit the same propulsive, fuzzed-out highs they did as younger men, but the album is shaded with a little more well-earned wisdom on quieter tracks like “Static and Cicadas” or their glitched-out take on murder ballads, “50 Years of Revenge.” The Biggest Shove in Space is dark and cold, but then again, so is Minnesota. There’s a pulse of rediscovery running through it, and a realization that even if not everything survives, there are things we can hold onto in ice or in amber until they’re ready to be reborn.