Kendra Sheetz 
Baltimore’s Underlined Passages has released a brand new album, A Quiet Condition, earlier this month via Mint 400 Records. The duo, consisting of Michael Nestor and Roger Stewart, has decided to introduce the album by playing you the end of it first.
“Bright Eyes” is the track that closes the new release. Lyrically, the album is about a specific kind of middle-aged disappointment — the sense that whatever you were working toward isn’t coming, and there’s no clear moment when you find that out, it just becomes true. “Bright Eyes” is where that all lands, pointed at a life spent scrolling through feeds and AI slop.
The new record follows the 2025 release The Accelerationists, but it’s quieter and a bit stranger than its predecessor. Nestor’s guitars still layer up in the same colorful way, but the vocals sit further back in the mix this time, and the songs don’t push toward anything. They just sit with what they’re describing. Stewart’s drums hold things together without doing much to drive them forward. While the due have been making and releasing music together since 2015, A Quiet Condition sounds like the clearest version yet of what they’ve been going for.
Stream “Bright Eyes” below:
And stream A Quiet Condition in full here:
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