Glitterer has announced a new album, Rationale, which will be the first since Ned Russin (also of Title Fight) turned Glitterer into a full band with musicians from the DC and Baltimore scenes: Nicole Dao on keyboard, Jonas Farah on drums, and Connor Morin on guitar. “After spending a year practicing songs about loneliness by myself, I decided a cohesive band was the only way to go,” Ned says. “It has been, and always will be, my preference to be in a collaborative, creative unit, I just had to figure out how to get there.”
The first single is “Plastic,” a minute-and-a-half song powered by a sludgy riff, a sturdy mid-tempo rhythm, and Ned’s unmistakable singing and songwriting style. “‘Plastic’ is the first song we wrote as a full band,” Ned says. “The song is only two parts, but it came together easy. The difficult thing is finding the right and logical path, and most of all, agreeing on it. And within fifteen minutes, we had a song fully written and ready to go. This song discusses the futility in recognizing negative habits, both on micro and macro scales; it always feels like we have to lie to ourselves that our garbage is someone else’s fault (even if it actually is).”
The album was produced by frequent collaborator Arthur Rizk, and Ned cites influences such as Lilys, Unrest, Fugazi, Nation of Ulysses, Wire, and Siouxsie and the Banshees on this one, as well as certain literature, like author and publisher Martin Riker, whose recent novel The Guest Lecture partially inspired the album title:
“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.”
“That quote and the book’s themes tied a lot into what I was thinking about while writing,” Russin says. “It’s about the need to find pleasure, and maybe more so meaning or purpose, in small, mundane things, the modern anxieties and frustrations with just trying to be a human being. The lyrics touch on a lot of those ideas.”
The album comes out February 23 via ANTI- Records. Listen to “Plastic” and watch the Chris Tharp-directed music video below.
Glitterer will also be opening for Quicksand at some shows this fall, and they’re opening the 2024 portion of The Hotelier and Foxing’s Home, Like Noplace Is There / The Albatross 10th anniversary tour. All dates are listed below.
Tracklist
I Want To Be Invisible
The Same Ordinary
Plastic
Can’t Feel Anything
Big Winner
Recollection
Certainty
It’s My Turn
Just A Place
No One There
My Lonely Lighting
Half Truth
Glitterer — 2023/2024 Tour Dates
with Quicksand:
10/30 – Atlanta, GA @ Terminal West
10/31 – Raleigh, NC @ Lincoln Theatre
11/1 – Washington, D.C. @ The Atlantis
11/2 – Wilkes-Barre, PA @ Axelrad
11/3 – Philadelphia, PA @ Underground Arts
with The Hotelier & Foxing:
2/9 – Atlanta, GA @ The Masquerade
2/10 – Orlando, FL @ The Beacham
2/12 – Houston, TX @ White Oak Music Hall
2/13 – Dallas, TX @ Granada Theater
2/14 – Austin, TX @ Mohawk Austin
2/17 – Los Angeles, CA @ The Belasco Theater
2/18 – San Diego, CA @ The Observatory North Park
2/20 – Santa Ana, CA @ The Observatory
2/21 – San Francisco, CA @ August Hall
2/23 – Seattle, WA @ The Crocodile
2/27 – Salt Lake City, UT @ The Complex
2/28 – Denver, CO @ Summit Music Hall