Criteria has always existed in the tension between beauty and weight. Between melody that feels almost comforting and volume that feels like a reckoning. Formed in Omaha by Stephen Pedersen following his departure from Cursive, the band emerged in the early 2000s as part of the same quietly world-shaping community that helped define an era of independent music. But Criteria was never about scene placement. It was about control and collapse. About writing songs that could carry both.

Across their early releases, Criteria built a body of work that felt deliberate, emotional, and unafraid of heaviness. These were not songs chasing trends or momentum. They were records made because they needed to exist. And when that need wasn’t there, Criteria went still. The band has never operated as a careerist project. It has moved only when there was something real enough to justify bringing it back to life.

That same instinct is what led to SEIZE!

In the fall of 2024, Pedersen made a conscious decision to write again, and to finish. To strip the process back. To let riffs and melodies, not structural complexity, carry the weight. What emerged is a record shaped by loss, professional upheaval, relational endings, and the slow recognition that every moment carries its own gravity because it will not last. SEIZE! is a sonically and thematically heavy album, rooted in death, in endings, and in the urgency of paying attention while something still exists.

There is no fictional distance here. The record reflects a period of profound personal and professional change: relationships dissolving, work cultures collapsing, chapters closing that once felt permanent. But threaded through that collapse is something equally central to the album’s identity: a refusal to disengage from the beauty of the present. The ordinary moments. The fleeting connections. The quiet accumulations that make up a life. SEIZE! lives in that dual meaning. To seize the day, and to seize like an engine. Motion and halt. Becoming and ending.

Sonically, the band set out to make something “pristinely heavy.” Not murk for its own sake, but clarity with mass. Pedersen has described the target as Smashing Pumpkins in their Siamese Dream era colliding with Battles and Quicksand, and that lineage shows up not as imitation, but as physicality: guitars that feel architectural, drums that feel enormous, melodies that remain intact even when buried in volume.

For the first time in the band’s history, Criteria entered a studio to make a record. SEIZE! was tracked over seven winter days at ARC Studios in Omaha with producer Matt Bayles. The process was intentionally compressed. No slow construction. No endless revisiting. A single sustained burst. Long days, loud rooms, hard deadlines. Bayles was brought in not simply for his technical command, but as a challenger. Someone willing to critique performances, push decisions, and extract the strongest possible version of the songs. After tracking, Bayles mixed the album, with mastering handled by Ed Brooks at Resonant Mastering, giving the record its final dimension and force.

Much of SEIZE! is literally built on a single harmonic foundation. Nearly every song was written with Pedersen’s guitar tuned to CCEGCE, an open, droning structure that turns the instrument into a massive, resonant object. A giant C chord. A whole lot of Cs. SEIZE!

Criteria is Stephen Pedersen (guitar, vocals), AJ Mogis (bass, vocals), Michael Sweeney (drums), and Aaron Druery (guitar). Together, they give SEIZE! its scale and its tension, allowing the songs to feel both human and immovable.

Criteria has never been interested in pretending that time does not pass. This is not a resurrection. It is not a victory lap. It is a document of where a life is right now, rendered in sound. A heavy record made by people who are paying attention. A band continuing because there is still something worth saying, and because volume is still one of the ways to say it.

Criteria LP Bundle