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Spartan Records and Criteria are pleased to present “I am the End,” the latest single to be lifted from the Friday, May 22 release of SEIZE!, the forthcoming studio album from the Omaha indie-rock band featuring Stephen Pedersen (ex-Cursive). “It’s not you. It’s me.” Whether it's the end of a friendship, a romance, or a job, “I am the End” is about owning its demise even when you’re never alone in that endeavor.  

"The video for ‘I am the End’ is a brief — and hopefully funny — reflection on the day-to-day, tiny miseries that many of us experience in adult life, keeping a straight face through it all and attempting to remain positive in the end,” Pedersen said. “Huge props to Jeff VanRoy and the team at Dundee Digital for shooting, co-directing and editing and Timmy Tamesiea and Mike Smith for conceiving, writing and performing the mini-misery vignettes!" 

The follow-up to 2020’s Years, SEIZE! is a sonically and thematically heavy record shaped by loss, endings, and the growing urgency to capture life while it’s still unfolding. The album reflects a period of profound personal and professional change: relationships dissolving, chapters closing, and attention turning toward the fragile beauty of the present. 

Recorded over seven winter days at ARC Studios in Omaha with producer Matt Bayles and mastered by Ed Brooks at Resonant Mastering, SEIZE! channels what Pedersen calls “pristinely heavy rock,” drawing from the symphonic guitars of Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream era, the pulse and syncopation of Battles, and the tension of Quicksand.

Pedersen had the following to share about the album: "These songs feel like alchemy under pressure — love as the undertow, empathy as survival, and seizing the moment as it seizes you.” SEIZE! as in seize the day, and seize as in halt, collapse, and end. This is not a comeback record. It is a document of where a life is right now, rendered in sound.