NOTHING SHARES NEW SINGLE “TOOTHLESS COAL”
TOUR STARTS 8TH FEBRUARY
A SHORT HISTORY OF DECAY OUT 27TH FEBRUARY VIA RUN FOR COVER
NOTHING by Luke Ivanovich
a short history of decay
PRE-ORDER: bandofnothing.lnk.to/ashod
“toothless coal”
LISTEN: https://bandofnothing.lnk.to/toothlesscoal
WATCH: https://youtu.be/ruY5GhJb6eg
Ahead of the release of their new album and launch of their upcoming tour dates, NOTHING kicks off 2026 with their new single “toothless coal,” the latest offering from their forthcoming album a short history of decay, due 27th February via Run For Cover.
“toothless coal” complements their previously released singles “cannibal world” and “purple strings” by showcasing a grinding industrial side of the band that sits closer to genre stalwarts My Bloody Valentine vs. the Madchester-indebted baggy sound of “cannibal world” and the stripped-down, acoustic guitar-led track “purple strings,” where the band’s typical vocal filters are absent. Always exploring new ways to bend sound and pushing the limits of genre conventions, these three singles lay the foundation for the wide-ranging sound that defines Nothing’s upcoming album. Due next month, the band’s fifth studio album stands as their most sonically expansive and emotionally direct work to date: a widescreen reckoning with time, truth, and the body’s slow unraveling.
Recharged by a newly solidified lineup featuring guitarist Doyle Martin (Cloakroom), bassist Bobb Bruno (Best Coast), drummer Zachary Jones (MSC, Manslaughter 777), and guitarist Cam Smith (Ladder To God, Cloakroom), a short history of decay captures frontman Domenic “Nicky” Palermo at his most unflinching, confronting aging, illness, and the weight of memory with startling clarity.
NOTHING will embark on tour dates in Japan this February, where they will share the stage with Whirr before they return stateside for an extensive North American headline tour, followed by a UK run. Supporting NOTHING across North American dates are Full Body 2, Cryogeyser, and Violent Magic Orchestra. Shows culminate at the band’s own festival, Slide Away, which takes place across multiple dates in New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Joined on Slide Away by bands such as Hum, Chapterhouse, Swirlies, and more NOTHING will celebrate the 10th anniversary of their seminal album Tired of Tomorrow with special guest lineups in each market. Tickets will be available here: https://laylo.com/bandofnothing/m/VG0Tgb. See below for the full touring schedule.
Tour Dates
2/8 – Tokyo Daikanyama, JP @ UNIT ^
2/9 – Tokyo Shindaita, JP @ FEVER ^
3/4 – Baltimore, MD @ Baltimore Soundstage ~
3/5 – Carrboro, NC @ Cat’s Cradle ~
3/6 – Asheville, NC @ Eulogy ~
3/7 – Atlanta, GA @ Masquerade – Heaven ~
3/8 – Birmingham, AL @ Saturn ~
3/10 – Dallas, TX @ Trees ~
3/11 – Austin, TX @ Mohawk ~
3/13 – El Paso, TX @ Lowbrow Palace ~
3/14 – Phoenix, AZ @ Crescent Ballroom ~
3/15 – San Diego, CA @ SOMA Sidestage ~
3/18 – Los Angeles, CA @ Belasco ~
3/19 – San Francisco, CA @ The Regency Ballroom ~
3/21 – Portland, OR @ Revolution Hall ~
3/22 – Seattle, WA @ Crocodile ~
3/26 – Minneapolis, MN @ Fine Line ~
3/27 – Chicago, IL @ Metro ~
3/28 – Cleveland, OH @ Grog Shop ~
3/29 – Detroit, MI @ El Club ~
3/30 – Toronto, ON @ Opera House ~
3/31 – Montreal, QC @ Bar Le Ritz ~
4/2 – Cambridge, MA @ The Sinclair ~
4/3 – Brooklyn, NY @ Warsaw ~
4/4 – Philadelphia @ Union Transfer ~
4/9 – Dublin, IE @ Button Factory ~
4/10 – Belfast, UK @ Oh Yeah Centre ~
4/12 – Glasgow, UK @ Stereo ~
4/16 – Leeds, UK @ Brudenell Socila Club ~
4/15 – Cardiff, UK @ Clwb Ifor Bach ~
4/16 – London, UK @ Moth Club ~
5/15 – Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Paramount *
5/16 – Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Paramount *
5/22 – Chicago, IL @ Aragon Ballroom *
5/23 – Chicago, IL @ Aragon Ballroom *
5/29 – Los Angeles, CA @ Hollywood Palladium *
5/30 – Los Angeles, CA @ Hollywood Palladium *
^ with Whirr
~ with Full Body 2, Cryogeyser, VMO
* Slide Away Festival with Hum, Chapterhouse and more
UK tour poster
a short history of decay album artwork
NOTHING
a short history of decay
Run For Cover Records
February 27, 2026
1. never come never morning
2. cannibal world
3. a short history of decay
4. the rain don’t care
5. purple strings
6. toothless coal
7. ballet of the traitor
8. nerve scales
9. essential tremors
About NOTHING and a short history of decay:
We’re not here to do the right thing. We never have been.”
Nothing frontman Domenic “Nicky” Palermo has never described his band in more succinct terms. Nothing have always been transgressors. Renegades who’ve rebuilt the stereotypically lightweight genre of Shoegaze in their own bloody-knuckled American image. Outlaw poets spilling existential dread on mile-wide canvasses of fuzz and reverb. Breathing in pain and suffering like oxygen, and exhaling those burdens of survival through a singular outpouring of pulverizing volume and ethereal quietude. Heavy as a thousand tidal waves. Light as ten teardrops.
Beginning as a Philly-born bedroom solo project in 2010, Palermo continually cites Nothing as a therapeutic outlet after a ‘decade of loss’ which includes his 2002 incarceration for attempted murder. Nothing’s music has always captured the full scale of the human condition, both the blaring anger and the whispering sadness. a short history of decay, Nothing’s fifth solo album and first for Run For Cover Records, widens that aperture even further, providing the most hi-def rendering of Nothing to date. The band have never sounded this colossal, never felt so intimate, yet never so this vulnerable.
a short history of decay follows Nothing’s 2020 triumph, The Great Dismal, a dark, steely evolution of the world-weary shoegaze sound they codified on their three previous albums: 2018’s Dance on the Blacktop, 2016’s Tired of Tomorrow, and 2014’s Guilty of Everything. At the time of Dismal’s release, Palermo thought the band might’ve reached its natural conclusion, but then life happened and “the urge to empty out the head resurfaced,” he explains. With the strongest arsenal in Nothing’s ever-shifting lineup locked in — guitarist Doyle Martin (Cloakroom), bassist Bobb Bruno (Best Coast), drummer Zachary Jones (MSC, Manslaughter 777), and third guitarist Cam Smith (Ladder To God, also of Cloakroom), along with a supporting cast of players ranging from string ensembles, to brass sections, and returning collaborator, harpist Mary Lattimore, Palermo set the stage to create the band’s most ambitious record yet.
Ironically, taking a step back is what inspired this step forward. In between touring, making a collaborative post-metal album with Full of Hell (2023’s When No Birds Sang), and launching a multi-generational shoegaze festival called Slide Away, Palermo was able to truly sit still and think for the first time since Nothing began. Without the two-year record cycle chomping at his toes, Nothing’s bandleader spent the last half-decade reading, introspecting, and reflecting on the time lost being submerged in the cycle of Nothing – and all he’d personally lost at home in “the real world” – over the last decade-plus of ear-bleeding debauchery.
But those same years which brought commercial success and a creative prosperity that ended up laying the bedrock for the 2020s shoegaze renaissance also took a toll on Palermo. Nothing’s grueling touring schedule and sometimes hazardously passionate live shows came with a personal cost. Remnants of lingering injuries stemming from regular emergency room visits and the excessive lifestyle plagued Palermo both physically and mentally. His sacred relationship with home and the people who had molded him were ironically lost in the clouds of chaos he sought to find his solace. Finally being grounded and forced to interrogate himself and the rapid passage of time, Palermo developed “somewhat of a clarity in the miscalculations”. A clarity that was often more frightening than affirming.
“I always trembled with fear before I left for tour. Feelings of dread absolutely consumed me. Not sure it’s specific to an instance or anything but maybe it’s a collaborative effort. After a couple days everything moves off of me and I feel confidant and strong. I’m around a lot of people consistently which isn’t the case at home. I think I’m able to create this alternate version of myself because I don’t have the stagnant time where I’m constantly looking internally,” Palermo says. “But now here I am sitting at home with way too much time on my hands with only myself and my crippling thoughts and I’m feeling exactly the way that I treated myself the past 12-13 years.”
Palermo’s age has manifested most glaringly with the onset of Essential Tremors, a neurological disorder similar to Parkinson’s disease that causes the body to shake uncontrollably, both physically and verbally. The non-life threatening condition runs in Palermo’s family, and while he’s always known it could catch up to him eventually, it’s become undeniably prominent over the last few years. Since Nothing’s last record, the trembles have become subtly audible in his singing voice.
“It’s just another thing to remind you, ‘my body’s in a decline,” he says. “Things are starting to fall apart.”
a short history of decay is, on one level, a documentation of that decline. In a broader sense, it’s a record about truth. Rather than cover up the tremors with reverb, Palermo wanted to leave his own bodily degradation uncharacteristically exposed, a reflection of the radical honesty that encapsulates every sound and lyric on a short history of decay The record begins with “never come never morning,” which he calls a love song. Palermo recollects growing up with a violent father and his own ‘silly’ remedies of finding a way to stabilize his young mind, memories that he’s kept tightly wound throughout Nothing’s career, but that he finally unspools here without any effects to safely obscure the meaning.
“I’ve written about things that I’ve never really talked with anyone before,” Palermo says. “Things I’ve always been too shook to surface for whatever reason.”
In “essential tremors,” the other tracklist bookend, Palermo once again murmurs dryly over a spartan chord progression. He’s singing plainly about his disorder, and you can hear it flutter faintly in each breathy utterance. But he’s also singing about the end of things. About time coming to collect everything around every corner. About the dread of “wrestling with myself” and the anguish of “dissecting the regret.” The song builds to a classic Nothing climax of mangled distortion and bashing drums, but unlike most Nothing tracks where Palermo’s reverb-glazed vocals sound high up in heaven, here, Palermo sounds like he’s sitting right in front of you the whole time. Grinning devilishly at his “favorite fear” with bloodshot eyes and quivering palms.
“Being closer to the end is a strange feeling,” Palermo admits. He calls the new record “a final chapter.” Not the end of Nothing, but the conclusion of a story that began with Guilty of Everything — another album about time, regret, and confronting uncomfortable truths — and now resolves with a short history of decay. As much a snapshot of Palermo’s past as it is a leap into Nothing’s future.