Spelled in full caps, Singapore’s CURB plays emo with a ferocious bite. The city-state has built a strong reputation in the genre since the mid-2010s revival, with bands like Terrible People, Xingfoo&Roy, and Forests helping push the scene into cult territory. CURB arrives from the same ecosystem, sharing creative ties with the indie lineage surrounding Subsonic Eye. The trio — guitarist Lucas Tee, bassist Sam Venditti, and drummer Farizi Noorfauzi — first met as diploma students at LASALLE College of the Arts. In their early days, they bonded over the precision of math rock and the intensity of emo’s technical side but eventually grew to appreciate more styles later on. Their debut album Hope You’re Doing Well, Michaella (2022) captures that shift. The record leans on blunt, diaristic lyrics and the kind of guitar crunch associated with bands like Title Fight, yet it resists emo’s more theatrical tendencies. Instead, songs such as “7AM” and “Insult Through Injury” thrive on tight, direct hooks. “Become Again,” one of the album’s heaviest moments, highlights the band’s collaborative dynamic, with all three members trading vocal lines over restless, back-and-forth grooves. By the time they reached the 2024 EP benjabes!, the group began stretching that formula. The record opens with a surprising detour: slurred half-rap verses delivered by rapper-producer Mary Sue, a longtime collaborator of Noorfauzi. From there, the band gradually slips back into the guitar-driven sound listeners recognize. For CURB, emo remains a starting point rather than a boundary. The band sees genre labels as temporary signposts rather than a fixed identity. In that sense, Hope You’re Doing Well, Michaella reads almost like a diary — a record of someone confronting their own contradictions while trying to move forward. Noisier, punk-leaning riffage surfaces in songs like “You’re Me But Worse” and “Blake & The Surf.” Both tracks seem more interested in the pull of friendships and fleeting fascinations than in the anxieties of growing up. In that sense, CURB taps directly into emo’s lineage, where immediacy and youth carry a kind of strange timelessness.