chokecherry - Ripe Fruit Rots and Falls
- Samuel Stevens
- 7 days ago
- 3 min read
On their debut album, Ripe Fruit Rots and Falls, out November 14, 2025, via Fearless Records, San Francisco-born duo chokecherry—vocalist/guitarist Izzie Clark and vocalist/bassist E. Scarlett Levinson—deliver a breathtaking, brutally honest portrait of young adulthood in a collapsing world. It’s a record steeped in the friction of coming-of-age amidst social decay, climate anxiety, dissolving futures, and an ever-present ache for a past that no longer exists. The band's debut was produced alongside Chris Coady (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV On The Radio), Christopher Grant, and Zach Tuch (Touche Amore, Movements). The album feels like a sonic time capsule of 2025: anxious, empathetic, furious, and defiantly human.
Across ten emotionally raw, richly layered tracks, chokecherry build a genre-fluid world where shoegaze fog meets post-rock sprawl, where punk-leaning catharsis collides with the gentle ache of dream-pop and ’90s indie. Their ambition is monumental—they’re not just chronicling heartbreak, but mourning the loss of imagined futures, the theft of stability, the erosion of empathy. “The album isn’t about heartbreak over an individual... It’s about heartbreak over the loss of childhood,” Levinson explains—and Ripe Fruit Rots and Falls succeeds by channelling this collective grief into something gripping, razor-precise, and deeply personal.
The album’s breakout single, “Major Threat,” is a jolt to the system. A nod to Minor Threat in name but spiritually closer to the ecstatic chaos of Turnstile or Mannequin Pussy, it’s chokecherry at their most feral. Clark’s shout-sing delivery—inspired by Brendan Yates (Turnstile) and Zack de la Rocha (Rage Against The Machine)—slices through wiry guitars and a frantic rhythm section. It’s messy, sweaty, electrifying. The VHS-shot video, steeped in DIY grit, perfectly captures the band’s roots: mosh pits, crowd-sprints, tongue-in-cheek humour about modern dating, and the scrappy sincerity that defines chokecherry’s live presence. It’s the most punk rock they’ve ever sounded, yet still unmistakably them. The opening track, “Porcelain Warrior,” sets the tone with a blend of soft disillusionment and poetic resolve. “Pretty Things,” meanwhile, serves as an atmospheric comedown after the ferocity of “Major Threat,” showcasing the duo’s signature harmonies—the kind that feel both feather-light and devastating. These early songs introduce the album’s duality: tenderness and fury, beauty and rot, intimacy and social commentary.
One of the album’s crown jewels, “Secrets,” unfurls like a dream descending slowly into chaos. Conceived between a Los Angeles apartment and a San Francisco studio session with Christopher Grant, it chronicles the uncomfortable ecstasy of change—leaving a city, shedding a former self, and starting over. Clark and Levinson’s connection to San Francisco—its fog, its trains, its mythic pull—saturates the song. The train audio in the outro is a particularly gorgeous touch, grounding the track in place and memory. Sonically, it’s all tension: shimmering guitars, layered gloom, and a final explosion that feels like stepping into a new life while still clutching the old.
Originally meant for the Messy Star EP (2024), “Goldmine” blooms fully formed here—and it’s stunning. Clark’s lyrics drip with longing, grief, and naive hope, while Levinson’s harmonies wrap the song in bittersweet, cinematic warmth. Chris Coady’s mix gives it that floating-underwater DIIV-esque shimmer. This is chokecherry’s mastery: weaving heartbreak and hope so tightly they feel indistinguishable. “Goldmine, tastes just like a fire” is the album’s most evocative lyric—beautiful, dangerous, irresistible.
“Part of You,” “You Love It When,” and “Oblivion” thread together themes of longing, identity splintering, and emotional erosion. The production dances between intimate whispers and widescreen distortion, never losing the human core beneath the noise. While the track, “February,” arrives like a cold exhale—minimalist, reflective, a quiet breakdown on a rainy day.
The album closes with “Ripe Fruit Rots and Falls,” an elegiac, slow-burning poem about impermanence—of relationships, of safety, of youth, of society. It’s both the thesis and the bruise: everything ripens, everything rots, everything falls. But chokecherry refuses to surrender to hopelessness. Instead, they sing through the collapse, insisting that empathy, expression, and connection still matter.
Ripe Fruit Rots and Falls is a rare debut: fully realized, emotionally towering, and fiercely of its time. It captures the angst of a generation raised on broken promises yet unwilling to numb themselves into apathy. It’s an album for anyone who feels like they’re standing in the rubble of a world that was supposed to be different—and is still trying, desperately, beautifully, to feel alive.
chokecherry has crafted something vital, vulnerable, and unforgettable. This is not just a debut—it’s a declaration. A stunning, soul-rattling first chapter from a band destined to become a defining voice of their era.
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