Glitterer, the former solo project of Title Fight’s Ned Russin, returns with a new offering – and now, Glitterer is a full band. Today, they announce their forthcoming LP, Rationale, to be released on February 23, 2024 via ANTI- Records. Out today is the commanding lead single, ‘Plastic’; directed by Chris Tharp, listen and watch the song’s new video – which features quick-cutting clips of ramen, riding on a motorbike and the head of an insect costume – below.
“‘Plastic’ is the first song we wrote as a full band,” Russin explains. “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).”
Following the release of his 2021 record Life Is Not A Lesson, Russin began to act on his instinct to broaden the project’s collaborative capacity. “I had a few different ideas of how to expand Glitterer,” he says, “but after spending a year practicing songs about loneliness by myself, I decided a cohesive band was the only way to go. 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.”
After a year of forced isolation amidst the COVID pandemic, the triumphant return of live music glimmered in the near distance, serving as an immediate motivator as he began recruiting musicians from the D.C. and Baltimore scenes. The lineup emerged with Nicole Dao on keyboard and Jonas Farah on drums, with Connor Morin on guitar for the album’s recording.
While Russin imbues the record’s lyrics with his familiar strain of dialectical rumination, all four members worked on the music together, crafting twelve expansive tracks in the new and fruitful process. The band recorded Rationale with producer Arthur Rizk (Ghostmane, Code Orange, Power Trip) who, to date, has either recorded, produced, mixed, mastered, or done some combination of all four on every single Glitterer record.
To an extent even greater than with Glitterer’s three previous albums, Rationale is steeped in the many streams of indie rock and post-punk/hardcore that originated in the variegated musical landscape of Washington, D.C., the band’s home base. Russin cites Lilys and Unrest as key influences on his recent songwriting, but the record also evokes heady and formally adventurous local legends like Fugazi and Nation of Ulysses, as well as some of the more theatrical and conceptual ’70s and ’80s British groups (e.g., Wire, Siouxsie and The Banshees) that made early and lasting impressions on the D.C. scene.
Self-releasing a self-titled debut album in 2017, Glitterer began as a new creative outlet for Russin after Title Fight suspended operations. Quickly gaining steam, he joined Tigers Jaw, Turnstile and others out on the road and released 2019’s Through The Looking Shades with ANTI- Records. After a collective pause when the world shut down in 2020, the record Life Is Not A Lesson was released in 2021. “Glitterer’s ‘Life Is Not A Lesson’ is an existential, idiosyncratic party,” said SPIN. “The sound of the entire album has become bigger and bolder than ever before while still maintaining the signature brevity, which he attributes to the influence of Guided By Voices.” Russin also released his first novel, a work of auto-fiction, called ‘Horizontal Rust’, in 2021.
‘Rationale’
- 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
