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GLITTERERGlitterer, the Washington, D.C., post-hardcore band, has a new record, its fourth full-length album. It’s called erer and it’s on Purple Circle Records, a little label that singer/bassist Ned Russin co-owns. Performed by a revamped lineup — drummer Robin Zeijlon and guitarist Colin Gorman came on board last year, joining singer/bassist Ned Russin and keyboardist Nicole Dao — and recorded by the prolific producer/engineer Arthur Rizk, who has worked on every Glittererer release since 2019, erer is the most thematically urgent work the band has produced to date. It’s also the most immediately and sustainedly ear-pleasing.
Paradigmatically, the lead single, “Stainless Steel,” booms Albini-like with sturdy yet subtle drumming, massive stereo guitars, and all manner of counterpoints and complements emanating from the keyboard, in support of a melody — a classic Glitterer melody — that twists and turns, starts and stops, and goes exactly where the listener didn’t remotely realize it needed to go. And in Russin’s typically sapient lyrics we hear, without superfluity or mawkishness, the bewilderment, resignation, anger, guilt, and stubborn commitment to beauty and community that the album exists to express. It’s the dialectical inner monologue of a socially engaged, intellectually curious creative aspirant — a person not unlike yourself — who can’t help but notice that it’s all coming to nothing. “It’s everywhere I turn / I can’t escape / I wish I had ability innate / I wish I wasn’t incapacitated,” Russin sings. ““I’ll pretend that I’m stainless steel / I’ll forget that this all is real.” What more needs to be said?
These are not optimistic times, and this is not, at the textual level, an optimistic record. See for yourself:
From “Until”: “There is nothing you can’t have / Don’t be afraid to reach and grab / Take and take with no regret / See if you can find the end / There is always more / Until there’s not”
From “Not Forever”: “Arc of progress bend towards me … / Have I grown complacent / After all? … / Self absorbed and so important / Aren’t we all? / Everything and everybody / Individual”
And yet, insofar as the lyrics refuse to put any kind of gloss on the emotional truth of the current moment, the music on erer dedicates itself, with intricacy and care, to the listener. A band that wanted only to aggrandize its own precious feelings of alienation wouldn’t go to the trouble of writing choruses and solos as powerful and effective as these. Ever since Glitterer began, in 2017, when Ned Russin began inconspicuously recording and releasing songs out of his New York apartment — short, spooky synth/drum-machine-based existential ditties that made your toe tap and your skin crawl — the songs have reliably gotten brighter, crunchier, catchier, and less ambivalent about their own charms. In this regard, Glitterer’s erer is something of an apotheosis, a record that says, Yes, the world-at-large is miserable and dissolute, but music is eternal and beautiful, and can’t be taken away from us so long as we continue to play it. So that’s what we’re going to do. We have to.
GRAHAM HUNT
Graham Hunt has an intuitive ability to carve out his own space within the long, confusing history of American pop music. The Wisconsin-based songwriter has spent the past four years hard at work building a trilogy of records that synthesize timeless guitar pop chops with a layered approach to production and a sly lyrical eye. His music balances the surreal with the quotidian, the melodic with the rhythmic, the cryptic with the triumphant–often proving that slacker playfulness and Heartland earnestness are not mutually exclusive. Timeless World Forever, the final entry in this trilogy and Hunt’s first release for Run For Cover, provides closure on a formidable body of songs while opening the gates for a new stage in the artist’s long, prolific career.
For years Hunt has been a staple of the Midwest indie rock world, dating back to his time leading Midnight Reruns and performing with acts like Mike Krol and Disq. In 2019 he released his first solo record, Leaving Silver City, but it was 2022’s If You Knew Would You Believe It? where he hit his stride. The album was quickly followed by Try Not To Laugh in 2023, and now Timeless World Forever picks up those threads. The three records are of a piece: all made in the same Madison basement with a beat-driven density and sonic imagination that is as indebted to rap and rave as power pop. “I learned Ableton and developed a cut-and-paste production style that I hadn’t previously used on any of my other records,” Hunt explains. “I thought, I’ll do a trilogy of albums like this, characterized by the recording location and style, but also by an overarching theme. The records represent a dialectical process: If You Knew Would You Believe It? suggests a preoccupation with material reality where Try Not To Laugh is a reaction to that, rejecting it and living in a world of ideas, emotion, and spirituality. Timeless World Forever is the synthesis, the process of one resolving its contradictions by passing through its own shadow. And in my mind, all three take place in the same universe, a sort of imaginary magic realist version of Madison.”
The album comes to life immediately with its expansive opening track, “I Just Need Enough.” The song introduces the core elements of Hunt’s sound: a collage style that’s equal parts intricate and immediate, and it’s defined as much by the songwriting as the recording choices. “I tried to approach the recording process like I was making a modern pop record,” he says. “I cut and paste things together to build a song as if I’m using MIDI instruments, but instead I use clips that I recorded of myself or my friends playing real instruments. I see it like the DAW is a canvas where you can paint a picture of an imaginary band.”
About those songs: “Power Object” is an Upper Midwest pop masterclass that hits like a lost jam session between Morris Day and Paul Westerberg; the Beck-like “East Side Screamer” sits next to “Ego Trippin’ (Part Two)” by De La Soul in the pantheon of songs with great screams; “Frog In The Shower” has three separate sections good enough to be a chorus. Timeless World Forever is filled with those little pop moments, the ones that separate a decent song from a great song; in aggregate, they add up. These are songs that trigger compulsive listening habits.
Hunt’s lyrics are often as intricate as the songs they’re contained in. “This record’s biggest theme is acceptance,” he says. “If If You Knew Would You Believe It? was cynical and Try Not To Laugh was speculative, then this one accepts the existence of both worldviews under the same sky.” The song’s characters are preoccupied trying to find peace within their circumstances: they’re accepting change in interpersonal relationships, accepting a confusing and upsetting world, accepting an ass whoopin’, accepting indecisiveness, endings, failure – even accepting acceptance itself.
It’s hard to look backwards and forwards at the same time without getting your wheels stuck in some sludgy atemporal mud. By sheer force of commitment, Hunt has made a body of music that makes an argument for experimentation within a tradition— one that invokes both familiarity and mystery. Timeless World Forever is the culmination of a half-decade of growth; it’s the sound of a lifer revving up, shifting into a higher gear, pressing his foot on the pedal, and attacking the highway.
PRIZE HORSE
Minneapolis’ Prize Horse make “a fuzzy, dreamy form of alt-rock that manages to be heavy and spaced-out at the same time” (Stereogum). The trio’s debut album, Under Sound, embarks their musical evolution which takes flight with ethereal, fuzz-laden tones departing from the grittier layers of their previous 2021 Welder EP.
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