Aidan Leclaire – ‘Diving’ [Album Review]

There is a moment, usually somewhere in your early twenties, when you realize the version of yourself you have been performing was never really for you. You said yes too many times. You kept the peace until the peace started keeping you.

Northern Virginia’s Aidan Leclaire spends all seven tracks of Diving in that exact moment of free-fall, and rather than smooth the edges, the band leans into the disorientation. This is a record about being pushed into water you cannot see the bottom of, and it sounds like it.

You feel the shove immediately. Opener “2:02” and the one-two of “Dive Slow” and “Talk” come in loud and unbothered, all bratty hooks and forward motion, the kind of raw alt-rock-meets-pop that wears its blink-182 and Green Day DNA on its sleeve without ever sounding like a tribute act. “Dive Slow” is the early standout, built around a chorus that flips a kiss-off into a release: “you’re not playing their calls anymore.” It is a song about refusing to keep performing for people who never had your back, and Leclaire delivers it like someone who only just figured out he was allowed to stop.

Then the floor drops out, in the best way. “Lucy” arrives like sunlight through a window, the album’s brightest and poppiest three minutes, an “uh-uh-uh” hook and a fascination the narrator knows is bad for him and chases anyway. On a lesser record it would feel like a non-sequitur. Here it is the deep breath before the dive.

Because Diving does not stay up here. The back half, “Parfait,” “Fishbowl,” and closer “Nature’s Tune,” sinks into something lower, slower, and far more exposed. The band trades distortion for space, soul for swagger, until “Nature’s Tune” lands the whole thing in near-acoustic folk, the noise finally burned off. It is a genuinely brave bit of sequencing, and Leclaire knows it.

“I initially tried to balance the album with an even mix of harder-edged and softer songs,” he says, “but that kind of symmetry doesn’t reflect real emotional life. We aren’t steady day to day.” Front-loading the heat and ending in the quiet is the most honest decision on the record.

What keeps Diving from being just a well-built mood swing is what lies beneath it. The whole album wrestles with the guilt of feeling your own problems loom large against a world of wars, climate dread, and a future that looks bleaker than the one you were sold as a kid. Leclaire never resolves that tension, and he is smart not to. The cover art holds the same uncertainty and the sense of not quite knowing where, or when, you are; its blurred, crimson haze making the familiar feel distant and unsteady.

If there is a knock, it is that the stylistic range occasionally works against cohesion. The leap from the punk snap of the opening run to the folk hush of the close is thrilling on first listen, but listeners who came for the loud version of this band may find themselves checking out before “Nature’s Tune” earns its landing. That is the risk of an album built to mirror an emotional rollercoaster: some people just want the up.

Mostly, though, the gamble pays. This is the sound of a young band, one that has quietly sold out rooms across DC, Richmond, Boston, and New York off the back of last year’s Hail to the Dogs, refusing to make the same record twice. Diving is messy in the way being twenty-three is messy, and it is all the more convincing for it. You can spend the whole thing bracing for the landing. The smarter move, the one Leclaire eventually makes, is to stop bracing and listen to the fall.

Diving Track Listing:

1. 2:02
2. Dive Slow
3. Talk
4. Lucy
5. Parfait
6. Fishbowl
7. Nature’s Tune

Run Time: 26:26
Release Date: July 10, 2026
Record Label: Independent