Set Adrift

Set // Adrift are a five-piece melodic hardcore band from Dallas, Texas, and they make music that takes seriously the idea that heavy and beautiful are not opposites. The band members, Andrew, Trey, Taylor, Jacob, and Joshua, have built their sound around the intersection of raw emotional weight and melodic ambition, citing influences like Being As An Ocean, Counterparts, and Casey as reference points for the kind of music they want to make: intense, layered, and honest about what it costs to feel things as deeply as their lyrics suggest.

The band describes their approach as blending melody, intensity, and ambient textures with heavy moments, and their catalog backs up that description. The 2024 EP Absence // Monument introduced their range to a broader audience, anchored by "Monument (feat. Jimmy Cudahy of SLWBRN)," a collaboration that brought in a guest vocalist whose own work shares the same emotional landscape. A visualizer directed by Trey Hawkins accompanied the track, giving it a visual life that matched the weight of the music.

"Bloom" is the song that Set // Adrift have identified as best capturing what they are: the melody and the intensity meeting in the same moment, the ambient textures creating space around the heavy passages. It is a useful window into the band's philosophy, which seems to be that the softest parts of a song can earn the hardest parts and vice versa. That dynamic, tension and release operating at the level of the whole song rather than just the arrangement, is what makes post-hardcore compelling when it is done with this much intentionality.

Their full-length To Love is to Regret arrived in 2025, an eight-song record that expanded the ideas seeded in the EP into something more fully realized. "Regret" as a single leading into the record was the subject of a detailed breakdown piece in Music Scene Media, evidence of a band that has attracted genuine critical attention. "Alchemy" followed as a 2025 standalone single, and "Disappear" arrived in 2026, continuing the forward motion.

The themes across Set // Adrift's work are consistent: heartbreak, mental health, emotional complexity, the ways that difficult experiences mark us and what we choose to do with those marks. Dallas has always had a rich and varied heavy music scene, and Set // Adrift have found their place within it by making music that has something real at its center.