CMON CMON keep the season behind glass on New England In Fall

CMON CMON have spent the last few years making power pop sound like a private decision rather than a costume. Jorrit Hermans, Steven Omblets and Michel Becx found their way back to songs in their forties, after a student band that never quite started, and put a debut album out in 2023. The Crack and The Light, produced by Alex Newport between the Netherlands and Los Angeles, carried true stories with the dark set beside a thin line of light. Radio stayed with them. Willy in Belgium kept the later singles close. In 2025 they opened the Belgian dates for The Sheila Divine, a Boston band whose audience already knew what a chorus can do when it refuses to soften. Headwind, out that March and produced by British producer James Brown, gave them All The Other Kids and Turn Off The Lights. The craft was already public. The subject, on this new single, is less willing to be looked at.

Leaf season in New England is a public appointment. Inns fill. Reports name the week the maples turn. People drive toward a color they have already seen in someone else’s photograph. CMON CMON have taken that appointment and locked it. The single is called New England In Fall. The sleeve, designed by Lisa Van de Vyver from photographs by Peter M. Hoste, shows no leaf at all. Night. Brick. A residence door. Two wide panes of frosted glass, with a warm room behind them that never becomes a room. You get the light. You do not get the furniture. Band photographs by Karolien Van Nerum, shot during the sessions, sit in the same withheld register. A season this famous usually arrives as a view. Here it arrives as a caption on a door you are not invited through.

They cut the song in spring 2026, a week at GAM Studios in La Chapelle, Waimes, inside the Hautes Fagnes, with Brown back in the chair after Headwind. Months later the reserve burned. The August fire moved across the High Fens, the largest wildfire in Belgian record, and the peat kept working underground after the surface looked finished. That sequence sits outside the lyric and still answers it. A place can look intact in a picture and already be gone in the ground. Hermans has called New England In Fall their most Novemberist song, and the one where he tries to write happy tunes and keeps failing. The literary nod is fair. The harder fact is local. They named an American autumn from a Belgian plateau that would not look the same by late summer.

Brown’s production keeps the band’s square groove and lets the melancholy sit in the voice rather than in a wash. Bass pulses. Drums hold a straight push, no swing offered as comfort. The guitars arrive with warm, defined distortion, a wall that fills the frame and still leaves Hermans a place to stand. In the verses he sings at a slight remove, almost reporting. Half the time he is not listening. He is at least trying. The chorus opens the melody without cheering it up. New England in fall, sung like a line written under a photo that will not develop. Short instrumental breaks keep the temperature steady. Nothing in the arrangement asks the feeling to hurry.

The images are blunt, and the song is better for refusing to dress them. She left her pills and walked out. She said she was dying. Hospital smells on her old coat, then the flat question of whether that was all he wanted. The last thing said becomes the first thing lost. Later, rush hour and a Monday morning turn the last thing she did into the best thing he will ever do. The title returns as a picture of her, from her, in fall. By the coda the grammar breaks into a loop. I have this picture. I have been running from it. I tell you every time. Doubles and echoes thicken the line until insistence replaces explanation. Hermans has said the song is easy on the ear and tough on the soul. The coda is where the second half earns its place. Power pop can survive on a chorus alone. This one survives because the chorus is a place name for a loss, and the sleeve will not show you the season it names. The light stays on behind the glass. The door does not open.

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New England In Fall is out now.

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