Jacksonville “nu-emocore” band Gilt released their sophomore album, I Saw Myself in the Black Screen, through Orlando imprint Smartpunk earlier this summer, and it sees the young band stretching their legs creatively in new and adventurous ways.
Blending emo screams, dizzying post-hardcore drums and undeniable nu-metal melodies, their new music has a nostalgic, skramzy early-Hot Topic vibe while pushing forward through experimental off-ramps. The band typically leans more emo, but injected other genres into their latest album seamlessly.
“If you’re in Jacksonville, you’re gonna listen to Limp Bizkit,” Tyler Fieldhouse, guitarist and founding member of Gilt, tells Orlando Weekly. “We talked a lot about that stuff, and it was important to work that in and be like, ‘How do we take enjoyable dumb riff-music and mix that with twink, screamo, frantic jazz,’ you know, whatever. That was our whole thing:
How do we put this stuff together?”
While partly a double entendre for the unpleasant emotion, Fieldhouse explained that the band’s name refers to the flecks of gold leaf in classical paintings, a choice influenced by his fine art degree.
“I just like artsy bullshit. I like emo, I like being a fine artist, so it’s something beautiful that’s also cold and metallic and kind of inhuman, so it’s the dichotomy of that,” Fieldhouse says. “It’s also a mom’s shopping website.”
The record focuses on media as a form of escapism, with an anime-inspired album cover and song titles like “Reverse Bear Trap” and “Seattle Day 2” serving as references bridging the gap between these media and reality. Lead vocalist Asha Locke says that in coming up with the album’s title, they landed a lyric referencing the movie I Saw the TV Glow directed by Jane Schoenbrun. She says the band felt the resulting I Saw Myself in the Black Screen was most representative of the album’s theme and connected best to the other references littered throughout the album. Fieldhouse offers that standout screamo track “Drywall” is the thematic core of the record in this story of getting lost in media.
“That’s the real character, and then everything that’s insulating it above and below, creating this barrier around it, are all these media-title tracks,” Fieldhouse says. “It’s a character that’s trying to insulate themselves from the real world with media, and then we’ve also physically structured the album that way.”
Fieldhouse formed Gilt in 2017 and Locke joined a year later, originally as the drummer, after covering Paramore songs in her high school pop-punk band.
Fieldhouse says they were first inspired to create after catching The Front Bottoms live.
“I was like, ‘Wow, this band fucking sucks. I can’t believe how low the bar of entry is.’ And then I was like, ‘Oh, why am I like holding myself to this like really high standard?’” Fieldhouse says. “So I made a Front Bottoms-esque band, and that went for like two years. We toured a crazy amount for me never having been in bands.”
Fieldhouse recalls these memories fondly while working on newer creative projects and coming up with concepts out of left field that they perhaps aren’t as confident about. Yet.
“When you’re doing something goofy and you actually just commit to the bit and do it, that is the best art always,” Fieldhouse says. “When you’re like, ‘Hey, you know what would be funny,’ and then if you actually go through the whole process, that’s always the best material in any creative field.”
See Gilt commit to the bit at Conduit in Winter Park on Friday. They’ll be playing alongside Florida pop-rock band Duellona, Orlando metal band Possessia, post-emo project Burial Joy and Ybor alt-pop-rockers Lascivious.
7 p.m. Friday, Aug. 7, Conduit, 6700 Aloma Ave., Winter Park, conduitfl.com, $19.90.
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This article appears in Aug. 5-11, 2026.