I Promised The World are a band born out of the desire to thrive in the face of tragedy. The Texas-based five-piece started life after the father of vocalist/guitarist Caleb Molina lost his in 2020 due to COVID. Though the band—completed by vocalist Hunter Wilson, drummer Mason Zschau, guitarist Mason Nowlin and bassist Rivers Shutt—didn’t actually form until a few years later in 2023, their existence is intrinsically linked to his death. It goes without saying that I Promised The World has always been both an extension and expression of Molina’s grief. But, as the band’s new self-titled EP demonstrates, it now also exists in defiance of it, as a celebration of Molina’s dad’s life.
“My dad was a musician who played every instrument,” says Molina. “He was the worship leader at church, so I'd go with him, be the first one there and help him set up. He was always up late making music, and that really inspired me. I wrote my first song probably three weeks after he passed, and I just feel like it's something that he's carried in. He's my biggest inspiration and motivation for making music—and I think he wouldn't believe it if he saw what we were doing right now.”
He's right. In a couple of short years, I Promised The World—whose oldest member is just 21—have done and experienced an awful lot. Initially called Sinema, the band released a debut EP, After The Flatline, and album, Fear Of The Fall, in late 2023 and 2024 respectively. Their blend of screamo, Midwest emo and post-hardcore is an emotionally volatile tour de force—certainly not something you’d ever hear in a church—that takes inspiration both from the late ’90s/early 2000s but through a post-internet lens. It means that I Promised The World are able to authentically channel and pay tribute to disparate influences such as, say, Glassjaw and Mineral, even though its members were barely alive, if at all, when those bands first broke up. At the same time, it’s not just a carbon-copy tribute to that era—these songs are injected with I Promised The World’s unique attitude and sense of purpose.
That’s something that has seen them share stages with the likes of Deafheaven, Harm’s Way, February, Midrift and more. In May 2025, the band—whose members, unusually, have never all lived in the same town—announced that, due to circumstances beyond their control, they were going to henceforth be known as I Promised The World. At the same time, they were insistent that “nothing else will change besides our name.”
While that’s true, Molina does also admit that this new self-titled EP also represents a kind of restart and rebirth for the band. Initially, it was going to be called Sinema, something that would directly tie the band’s present (and future) to their past, but in the end decided to go with the eponymous title to highlight everything that’s changed for the band since they started writing these five songs.
“It was a big transitional period for us,” says Molina. “Not only in terms of the name, but also the tours we're doing, and how much busier we got. We still have the DIY ethos, but we went from playing basement shows and local shows every weekend to being on tour where that wasn’t possible to do. But things feel really good right now, and I'm very glad to have accomplished my goals. I feel like I've proved myself to myself.”
Recorded at Timber Studios in Bayonne, NJ with Jon Markson and Adam Cichocki, I Promised The World begins tentatively, quietly, somberly, with the atmospheric intro of opener “Proud” before that song then erupts properly so that blend of screamo, Midwest emo and post-hardcore hybrid is suddenly flowing in full, unstoppable force, like blood through—or maybe even out of—veins. Throughout the EP, Molina’s yearning, broken vocals and Wilson’s dark, guttural growls swirl in and out of each other. “Proud” is followed by the otherworldly swell of “A Pure Expression” before the simultaneously aggressive yet vulnerable surge of “Bliss In 7 Languages”. Then there’s the shapeshifting “Future Worth Dying For” which reinvents itself each time you think you know where it’s going, before “Emerald Waltz” closes things out, as it evolves from the quiet, pained desperation of its beginnings into a constant, cacophonous crescendo that’s both beautiful and foreboding at the same time.
As they’ve always done, Molina and Wilson collaborated on the lyrics for each of these songs, which only serves to double down on the intensity of the emotions they contain and exude. Inspired by an epiphany that they had leading up to the making of this EP, on all five songs there’s a palpable sense of I Promised The World taking control of their lives—both as a band and as people—and of being intentional about everything they do. “We're all getting to that age where we're trying to fully transfer to adult life,” says Molina. “Writing this EP, we realized that if we want to succeed in our band and in life, we have to give it our all. We realized this could be something if we didn't fuck around. It was also around the time Hunter became straight edge. I still partake in a little bit of drinking and stuff, but me and him used to literally smoke weed every day, and it was getting in the way of doing what we wanted to do. We just wanted to be fully present at every moment, take full control and reach our full potential. We wanted to make our future a reality.”
I Promised The World, then, is a powerful artistic manifestation of their decision to do exactly that. It’s symbolic of both the old iteration of the band and the new one, because even though nothing has changed, everything has changed. This is a new beginning, of sorts, that details I Promised The World’s dreams. As Molina puts it, it’s about “being hopeful and not giving up and following your ambitions.” In other words, it’s the sound of the band shedding the skin of who they were in order to fully become who they’ve always known themselves to be. “That’s why I really wanted it to be self-titled,” says Molina. “Because this is us.”
