Nothing have always been rule-breakers. Shoegaze rebels who reinvented the typically lightweight genre with their own hard-hitting American image. Outlaw poets who unfurl existential angst across vast canvases of fuzz and reverb. Starting as a solo project in a Philadelphia bedroom in 2010, Nothing's music has always captured the full spectrum of human experience, from screaming rage to whispering sadness. "A Short History of Decay," Nothing's fifth solo album and first for Run For Cover Records, expands this horizon even further, offering the most high-resolution portrayal of Nothing to date. The band has never sounded so colossal, never felt so intimate, never been so honest. With the strongest arsenal in Nothing's ever-evolving lineup—guitarist Doyle Martin (Cloakroom), bassist Bobb Bruno (Best Coast), drummer Zachary Jones (MSC, Manslaughter 777), and third guitarist Cam Smith (Ladder To God, also of Cloakroom)—singer-songwriter Domenic "Nicky" Palermo knew he had the manpower to record the band's most ambitious album yet. Co-written and produced with Whirr guitarist Nicholas Bassett, it also features additional production and mixing work by Sonny Diperri (DIIV, Julie). *A Short History of Decay* is the most musically mature statement in Nothing's catalog. Songs like "Cannibal World" and "Toothless Coal" are catastrophic outbursts of mechanized industrial-gaze that sound like My Bloody Valentine—only more extreme. At the other end of the spectrum is the artfully dark "Purple Strings," featuring a gorgeous string arrangement with the participation of harpist and two-time Nothing collaborator Mary Lattimore. This baroque delicacy permeates other highlights of *A Short History of Decay*, notably "The Rain Don't Care," a buoyant ballad that channels the worn elegance of *Mojave 3*, and "Nerve Scales," a rattling bop that, in its combination of otherworldly atmosphere and lethal precision, recalls Radiohead. Palermo describes the new album as "the final chapter." Not the end of Nothing, but the conclusion of a story that began with Nothing's 2014 debut album, Guilty of Everything—another album about time, regret, and confronting uncomfortable truths—and now finds its conclusion with A Short History of Decay. It is as much a snapshot of Palermo's past as it is a leap into Nothing's future.