2021 release. "I couldn't sleep at all while making this record," admits Hawthorne Heights frontman JT Woodruff of his band's eighth full-length, The Rain Just Follows Me. "It was an 18-year breakdown in the making." The 11-track record stands as some of Woodruff's most resonant writing to date, as he unravels themes of both physical and emotional distance as well as personal identity - anxieties so exacerbated by the last year that it's incredible the album was completed before the pandemic hit. ("There's so many undertones of what would happen over the next 16 months," he says with a laugh. "I don't know if that makes us the emo Nostradamus or what.") Most of all, The Rain Just Follows Me is quintessentially Hawthorne Heights. It's who they've always been - they just needed to push down the heartache and strife long enough to rediscover those intangible characteristics.