Glare stretch guitars into pink-edged smears and let the distortion do the talking. The Rio Grande Valley four-piece recorded this debut with Phillip Odom, who mixed it before sending it to Will Yip for mastering. Eleven tracks of woozy, overdriven dream pop that sit somewhere between shoegaze's wall-of-sound approach and the looser, more DIY end of indie rock. The production keeps things deliberately rough-edged rather than polished into oblivion.
There's variety in how hard they push. 'Guts' rides a sweet, chugging guitar line. '2 Soon 2 Tell' goes gauzy and romantic. 'Nü Burn' crunches harder, nodding to earlier hardcore leanings. But even at their most aggressive they've softened compared to previous releases, leaning into more recognisable song structures without losing the humid, delirious quality that makes this band work. The album deals with grief and mourning, though it communicates more through texture than lyrics.
For people drawn to the current wave of shoegaze revivalists but wanting something less pristine. The Rio Grande Valley setting comes through in the heat and scale of it. Available in the usual digital formats plus vinyl, CD and cassette if you want the physical.
