Toward the end of Title Fight’s Friday night set at Webster Hall, Ned Russin, one of the band’s two singers, introduced “Rose of Sharon,” a song from the band’s new album, with a bit of hushed reverence.
“This song is about permanence,” he said. “This song is about everything.”
In a sense, it’s also about how to smooth out the rough edges of your past in hopes of making something more lasting. “Rose of Sharon” is one of the more elegiac songs on the impressive “Hyperview” (Anti-). That album is a marked shift from its predecessor, the excellently pummeling “Floral Green” (SideOneDummy), from 2012.
Once a forthright basher of a band, Title Fight has become deeper, more reliant on its emotions. As it has done so, it’s begun to play more loosely with its posthardcore and emo roots, making music that trades urgency for complexity.
The swaggering center of the new album, and of this show, was “Your Pain Is Mine Now,” oozing with shoegaze cool. During moments like this, Title Fight got knotty. But even at its most immersive, the band — Mr. Russin on bass; his twin brother, Ben, on drums; and on guitar, Jamie Rhoden (who also sings) and Shane Moran — manages a clarity of purpose.
During its “Hyperview” material, the band was contemplative and settled. But it didn’t abandon its old tensions, mixing in several songs from its last album, quick jabs sprinkled in amid the body work. From time to time, Mr. Russin would spring into the air, legs akimbo — posi jumps, they’re called — as a reminder of the rowdy energy on which the band first built its reputation.
Title Fight was playing middle in a three-band bill. The headliner was La Dispute, a straightforward band with a wider range of influences — at one point during its set, there were distinct, and unwelcome, shadows of Sublime. The more compelling and apt partner to Title Fight was the opener, the Hotelier. Preoccupied with raw-nerve feeling and storytelling, it’s a much more literal inheritor of emo tradition.
As punk, in its Warped Tour variant at least, has painted itself into metalcore and synthesizer-driven corners, emo is constantly being born and dying and being born again more or less in the shadows.
The Hotelier is thriving in these underfed spaces. Its 2014 album, “Home, Like Noplace Is There” (Tiny Engines), was exceptionally sharp, a tuneful blast of agony. Here, the singer Christian Holden was plaintive and empathetic while the band gave him ample room to breathe.
“We write songs about caring deeply for the people you love,” he said.
And then he got back to aching.
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