May we all live long enough to savor our revenge. Since the release of their debut album a decade ago, indie-rock quartet Adult Mom has wholeheartedly grappled with pain, frustration, and disillusionment, all while offering koans to hopeful resilience. On Natural Causes, their fourth album, they embrace a new emotional register: rage that burns so bright you can light your way by it. 

Stevie Knipe, the group's principal songwriter and lead vocalist, wrote the songs on Natural Causes from 2020 to 2023 during a period of both global tumult and personal upheaval. The album arrives in the wake of Knipe undergoing intensive treatment for cancer in their late twenties, an experience that brought them into direct confrontation with their own mortality. As they started writing songs from that vantage, they found they could stare down difficult memories of abuse and toxic relationships with a new ferocity.  

"Feeling like you’re a prisoner in your own body to medical professionals makes you very sad, but also very angry. There were nights where I would have full tantrums. I felt like a 13-year-old just from the pure anger of it," says Knipe. "You revert to this childlike state of, This is not fair! It unlocks those other moments in your life when you were like, This is not fair." 

Though Knipe has been out as queer and non-binary since Adult Mom's debut, their relationship to their identity, like many queer artists', has evolved and revealed itself in long waves. They came out as a lesbian after writing Adult Mom's lauded 2021 album Driver, and many of the songs on Natural Causes cut through the knots of compulsory heterosexuality and coerced gender normativity. Getting more deeply in touch with your own queerness can feel liberating and thrilling; it can also thaw out oceans of anger you never knew you had from all the times you had to stay alienated from yourself to survive. 

"Thematically, I got more comfortable with getting darker," says Knipe. "I knew there were things I wanted to explore that I didn’t get to on Driver, like the traumatic side of trying to unravel all this learned straightness. There were things happening interpersonally where I was like, OK, now I need to really tackle the tough parts of this process." 

Scenes of righteous violence bookend Natural Causes. Opener "Door is Your Hand" crashes in like Sheryl Crow at her very poppiest with a bloody machete slung over her shoulder. "You took what you wanted / And you slammed the door in my face when I resist / I picture your head / Rolling off into a dead end," Knipe seethes over golden-hued guitars and punchy snares. On the last track "Headline," Knipe envisions a frat house full of predatory young men going up in flames after remembering how their skin crawled in their noxious company. 

Throughout its nine tracks, Natural Causes meshes the buoyancy and eclecticism of R.E.M.'s jangle-pop with Lucinda Williams' soul-cutting depths. The album spotlights Adult Mom's most expressive and exuberant songs to date, as well as some of their sparsest and bleakest. "Benadryl" speaks plainly to the loneliness and existential terror of cancer treatment, with only a French horn accompanying Knipe's strummed acoustic guitar. In turn, the airy "Crystal," adorned with Lily Mastrodimos's banjo and mandolin, heightens Knipe's lyrics about tamping down their own queerness while stuck inside a deadening relationship. "I am living in crystal / Two way glass / I can see myself / But you cannot see me back," they sing, playing up the contrast between cheery sound and chastening subject before the climax kicks up into angry, cathartic distortion. 

The record's brash, bright, high-contrast sound grew organically from a 10-day stay at the Artfarm Recording studio in New York's Hudson Valley. The full band worked from loose demos to develop the songs together in the moment rather than following a fixed blueprint. "It was a very communist practice of making a record. It was the whole band and our engineer Chance [Milestone], and we were all making choices as a unit," says Knipe. "Every guitar tone, every sound that you hear was all decided together. We’re all the collective producer. I’ve never made a record like that before." 

Spending time together in a rural environment across a longer timeframe allowed the band to ease into a relaxed, unhurried creative process. "There were horses, there were walking trails. We were all sleeping in a room together. It was very rustic and beautiful and pastoral. We were all very stress-free, which I think is reflected on the songs," says Knipe. "For all of us to ego-check at the door and make the thing that we were most proud of was really liberating. It was the easiest process that I’ve ever had with production. And it was genuinely probably the best 10 days of my life." 

After years of deep friendship and creative collaboration, the members of Adult Mom -- Knipe, Mastrodimos, Allegra Eidinger, and Olivia Battell -- cultivated an environment of powerful trust that allowed them to play, experiment, and take risks while recording. They invited additional musicians to join them at Artfarm to weave orchestral flourishes into the record. James Richardson stopped by to play horns, Maeve Schallert layered strings, and Andrew Hoben -- Knipe's former neighbor -- contributed piano. The band folded each of them into their communal artistic practice, inviting them to compose and arrange their parts onsite rather than working from pre-written sheet music. Songs like "Matinee" rise to newly theatrical heights: horns, strings, and piano all braid together over a country-rock foundation, launching Knipe's vivid lyrics across the screen in full Technicolor. 

With Natural Causes, Adult Mom hammer home the revelation that self-knowledge is not a destination. It's an active movement, and it's one you can't embark on by yourself. Each of us emerges, suffers, and heals in relationship to other people; to really get to know ourselves, we have to reach beyond our own edges. 

"I faced some really intense things before I wrote this record. Now I’m ready to approach them in a different way," says Knipe. "How is it going to feel when I get to sing these songs? How is this going to make me feel when I get to tell this part of my story? In the past, I wasn’t thinking about that. Now, I can’t wait to play 'Door is Your Hand' live. It’s going to feel so empowering."