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Rhodie season is in full bloom, and not just for Portland’s springtime flowers. Last week, hometown rockers Rhododendron released their long-awaited sophomore album, Ascent Effort. It’s a five-track, 40-minute outburst of relentlessly technical, progressive composition that displays the trio’s impressive sonic evolution in the five long years since their 2021 debut.
Made up of Gage Walker (bass), Noah Mortola (drums), and Ezra Chong (guitar and shrieks), Rhododendron is situated somewhere in the masochistic medium between post-hardcore, noisy math rock, and whatever dissonant delights they discover that day.
“Our flavor of music can be pretty hard to listen to and digest,” Mortola admits. “It requires a discerning and acquired taste.” Mortola, an expert in said flavor, recorded and produced the band’s 2021 album Protozoan Battle Hymns.
The trio met in 2018 at School of Rock Portland and later found their footing as an ensemble in the city’s DIY, all-ages scene.
“We are definitely a DIY outfit at heart,” Mortola says in anticipation of an upcoming 10-date tour, including the album release show at the Aladdin Theater on May 30. “One of my favorite things about taking this next step is being able to play bigger rooms, but still being able to run a house show on tour.”
Rhododendron attributes much of their musical development to the city’s DIY ecosystem and early friendships with local bands like Grolixes and Sea Moss who aspired toward a similar sonic individuality within the noise.
Now young adults, Mortola and Walker recount influential moments along the way, like their very first show at Black Water in 2019 and, later, when the nonprofit Friends of Noise subsidized gas money for their West Coast tour in 2023.
“Shout out to André [Middleton, executive director of Friends of Noise] for that,” Mortola says. The band went on to play formative shows at the Hawthorne Theatre and Pickathon’s Galaxy Barn in 2024.
Like the music, the band is precise and aligned when it comes to describing the subtle particularities between the first and second records. Having recorded most of Protozoan Battle Hymns in isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic, there were limited opportunities to test new material live and collaborate with the music community they’d built. Mortola described the recording process for Protozoan as “an echo chamber of our own ideas,” which posed challenges when it came to establishing a cohesive voice.
Similarly, Walker described the first record as “a bit of an identity crisis,” recounting how that early creative process felt slightly pidgeonholed.
“‘This is the shoegaze-inspired track, this is the screamo-inspired track,’” he quips. “We were boxing ourselves into a corner.”
Ascent Effort is more integrated and cohesive by design. Rhododendron recorded and co-produced the album at The Unknown Studio in Anacortes, Wash., this time alongside a larger creative team of engineers and collaborators. “Having external people in the recording process was vital to broadening the sound,” Mortola says.
The team intentionally mixed and mastered the record before label shopping—an effort to ensure agency in defining their own voice—and they eventually landed a deal with Flenser Records, a self-described “independent dark music label,” which supported the unabashed musical identity that Rhododendron carries into their next chapter.
Ascent Effort’s triumph lies in its attention to detail, reflecting the band’s thoughtful intention behind its progression. “The new album varied our songwriting and sound in a way that isn’t beholden to genre or scene,” Walker says. “We moved through a couple different iterations of what we wanted to be from composition to release.” Mortola’s production chops helped translate the audio minutiae from one album to the next, purposefully bridging yet also distinguishing the growing catalog.
The band is intent on bringing the same specificity to the live show. The songs’ density presents Rhododendron with the creative challenge of blending technical performance with unbound expression onstage. “The raw, live elements of looseness and creative energy is where it’s at for me. It requires a lot of personal practice and overall care,” Mortola says. “Being able to play live captures an energy that’s not as scattered.”
“We practice our asses off, for sure,” Walker adds, “but we’re exploring that other side of the coin with loose, unwieldy energy and bouncing off each other.”
Ascent Effort’s final track, “Within Crippling Light,” is a 13-minute journey through Rhododendron’s experimental universe. The soundtrack to a planet that can’t preserve life. Over several movements, a slow, steady build grows to multiple detonating climaxes. It’s an unpredictable and desolate sonic landscape that steadily—at times with frenzied delirium—propels in all directions until Chong’s final guitar screech.
The trio proved themselves as a compelling, noisy voice with something to say nearly a decade ago, and the DIY scene that raised them intentionally doesn’t possess the conventional infrastructure to sustain their success. Nonetheless, Rhododendron is steadfast in that identity moving forward.
“We [haven’t] lost the bottom,” Mortola says of the band’s growth. “We still have our feet on the same ground.”
SEE IT: Rhododendron plays at the Aladdin Theater, 3017 SE Milwaukie Ave., 503-234-9694, aladdin-theater.com. 8 pm Saturday, May 30. $24.50. All ages.
