Glitterer - Rationale
Stereogum: Album Of The Week
“Glitterer has become a full-band powerhouse riding the momentum of great, post-hardcore-influenced power-pop. If Built to Spill came up in the Denton emo scene, I imagine it would sound like this.” – Paste Magazine
In seventy seconds, Glitterer’s latest track “The Same Ordinary” quickly unleashes high-impact musical gestures and grapples with purpose. The song is their last offering before unveiling their fourth LP and full band debut, Rationale, out next month on February 23 via ANTI-.
“‘The Same Ordinary’ was one where I got lyrically ahead of myself and had to rearrange the song to make it fit,” shares lead singer and songwriter Ned Russin on his process. After several rounds of trial and error, “finally, I just decided to try and throw in an abbreviated measure at the end of the phrase, like a little tag. After all, I wanted to keep the lyrics, which analyze how a pursuit of purpose is at times monotonous and maybe inescapable even if we are critical of it, in fact…I think it’s the element of the song that makes the whole thing work, a kind of harsh turn that also oddly acts as forward propulsion.”
A recurring theme throughout the record, Rationale is concerned with whether “the push and pull between finding purpose and feeling lost, and maybe even as far as if we even exist or not, are maybe just the same side of an arbitrary coin,” Russin explains. On his mind throughout the writing process was Martin Riker’s most recent novel, The Guest Lecture, a stream-of-consciousness work chronicling the insomniatic thoughts of a young economist who was recently denied tenure.
“Ideology,” the protagonist says to herself at one point, is “all the assumptions you make about how to live, and you live so deeply inside these assumptions that it’s very difficult…to remember which parts of your reality are natural and inevitable, versus which parts are things people just made up.” This statement and its influence on the record, Russin continues, “have to do with the fact that these things that we take to be so important and so suffocating are really just constraints of our own creation. We don’t have to revolt against these ideas or institutions, we have to rebuild them.”
Started by Russin in 2017, Glitterer became his solo creative outlet a year after his previous band, Title Fight, stopped touring, giving oblique expression to the quiet panic he felt about the direction of his life and nature of existence. Produced by Arthur Rizk (Ghostmane, Code Orange, Power Trip) and influenced primarily by D.C. indie rock and hardcore mainstays, Rationale marks a crucial turning point for the project six years on, seeing Russin (vocals, bass guitar) return to a fully collaborative and expansive unit – “It has been, and always will be, my preference,” he says – joined by Nicole Dao (keyboard), Jonas Farah (drums), and Mike French (guitar), with Connor Morin recording guitar on the record.
Glitterer will be joining The Hotelier and Foxing on tour next month, followed by a brief March headline run with support from Glixen. All dates are listed below, and tickets can be purchased HERE. (Contact us with any requests)