Glitterer • Graham Hunt • Prize Horse
Tue 03/03/26
6:30PM
All Ages
music
$18 ADV // $23 DOS
Show Lineup
Glitterer
(Washington DC)
Genre: Post-Hardcore
Glitterer, 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
(Milwaukee, WI)
Genre: Alternative Rock, Power Pop
If you know how to work the angles, you can fit a lot into the container of a three- or four-minute pop song. Graham Hunt understands this. Since he was a teenager, he’s been working at perfecting the form, writing songs that get to the heart of what makes Midwestern guitar pop so essential, and doing it while sidestepping any of the dead-end creative moves that weigh down many in the genre.
Nowhere is this balancing act as clear as on the Madison-based artist’s new LP, Try Not To Laugh. It’s a record where breakbeats coexist with anthemic choruses and synth runs go toe-to-toe with acoustic guitars. From start to finish, the song stays at the forefront.
It’s been the throughline for Hunt, who has played in street punk bands and power pop bands and hardcore bands and the underrated Midnight Reruns, who pushed a distinctively Upper Heartland kind of songcraft, one that led to opening slots for The Replacements and a diehard following of Wisconsin alcoholics.
Do you want some reference points? Well, you don’t need them to enjoy this music, but here goes: this music sounds like the Dust Brothers, if they produced an album for Paul Westerberg; this music sounds like Guided By Voices, if Robert Pollard was more influenced by Happy Mondays than British prog-rock; this music sounds like whatever mildly funky Zoomer indie rock band you want it to sound like, if any of those kids knew how to write a chorus.
Speaking of choruses, the record’s lead single “Emergency Contact” has one so big and satisfying that, in a different era, it would’ve knocked on the door of the Top 40—or at least the CMJ charts. The song’s lyrics, like many of the lyrics on this record, are a collaged rendering of the quotidian Midwest experience, made triumphant through the force of the music. With Try Not To Laugh, Hunt has made an album that is made for living inside of.
“Driving down 94/The power grid’s on fire/Don’t get out of the car until the song is over.”