Chasing Fridays: Deafheaven, Quannnic, Jivebomb, more

It feels wrong to be promoting anything art-related right now with the way things are going in the U.S. That's been more or less how it's felt to exist for the majority of my adult life, but this past week has been especially bleak, frustrating, and terrifying. Trans healthcare is on the brink of being eliminated in this country. To quote from a crucial thread posted by Ekko Astral earlier this week, "This will kill people. This will kill KIDS, first, and slowly but surely a lot more people." Read the rest of the thread here for some suggestions on what to do during this critical moment in American history, where a marginalized population of our citizenry is being targeted by legislation that's intended to remove them from public life. To persecute them for who they are. To prevent them from existing at all.

I don't have the language to convey how I feel about the people in Trump's administration who are creating this legislation, or for those in the Democratic party – and their PR wing in the mainstream liberal media – who have refused to meaningfully fight for trans lives since the American right made it a core part of their agenda to target them. These people are morally and spiritually vacant. I do not recognize humanity in those who hate trans people – or those who are indifferent to their plight, who professionally downplay the gravity of this political moment, either out of convenience, ignorance, or self-servitude.

Any elected official who doesn't vocally and materially defend the right for trans healthcare – a human right, without which the ability to live with dignity is impossible – right now and forever going forward is a coward, a fraud, and actively complicit in a coordinated attempt at eradicating an entire population. Any journalist, particularly those with power at establishment publications, who doesn't convey the grave seriousness of this threat to trans lives right now is undeserving of their professional title. They, too, are cowards, frauds, and active stewards of an authoritarian attempt at extermination.

For everyone else, particularly cis trans allies like myself, I refer to Ekko Astral singer Jael Holzman's call to action in the aforementioned thread: Call your congress people. Protest. Speak up. Do anything to show that you're willing to fight for the basic human rights of trans people in this country and around the world. Do it. Now. There's no time to waste.

With that being said, I wrote about some music this week, new and old. It's one of the only things that's been able to take my mind off of our declining democracy. Read it if you wish, but don't let it distract you from what I wrote above.

Quannnic - "Wrenches"

In 1994, shoegaze was virtually dead in the U.K. Slowdive's Souvlaki had tanked. My Bloody Valentine were off the grid. Chapterhouse had broken up. ​Boo Radleys were chasing Britpop, with Lush soon to follow. Ride, too, had parted ways with the sound they ushered into popularity just a few years before. ​On their third album, Carnival of Light, Ride hired Black Crowes producer John Leckie – specifically because he was the Black Crowes' producer — and fully unhitched from shoegaze, embracing the smokey, luxurious psych-rock that had informed their sound from the beginning (The Byrds, mostly). Carnival of Light wasn't a great album. Instead of meeting their late-60s heroes on the same playing field (an unlikely gambit from jump), Ride ended up sounding generically retro and woefully unrelatable to the fans who fell in love with their bleary, deary shoegaze just a few years prior.

Weirdly, Quannnic's new song "Wrenches" sounds kind of like Carnival of Light. Or rather, a version of Carnival of Light in which Ride retained the frayed edges and youthful vitality of Nowhere and Going Blank Again. The sexed-up groove, the ivy-like ropes of psych-y guitar, the way Quannnic sings like they've been spending time smoking cigarettes in their bedroom while Let It Bleed spins on the turntable. "Wrenches" sounds a little bit like Carnival of Light opener "Moonlight Medicine" – albeit, if Chino Moreno sang it instead of Mark Gardener. I didn't expect this turn from Quannnic.

The 21-year-old is best known for their Deftonesy 2022 song "life imitates life," one of the songs responsible for shoegaze's renewed popularity on TikTok. "life imitates life" is a good song, but I'm partial to Quannnic's 2023 album, Stepdream, where the shoegaze got gazier and everything else less so. Jeff Buckley, Elliott Smith, and Nirvana are just as baked into Stepdream as Quannnic's current tourmates in Slowdive. I expected Quannnic to distance themselves from their shoegaze past on whatever they put out after Stepdream, but "Wrenches" is still a shoegaze song. I think. Its shape is tall and spire-like, Quannnic's voice pointing vertically upwards as the drums seem to levitate. But there're still horizontal nests of shoegazey guitars, and when Quannnic's voice isn't whisking it up, every instrument wants to stick and glop together like cornstarch in water. More like carnival of de-light.

Deafheaven - "Magnolia"

New Bermuda is the best Deafheaven album. Sunbather is great, Ordinary Corrupt Human Love is good, and Infinite Granite is painfully boring. (Roads to Judah is, like...fine.) But New Bermuda is a fucking triumph, and Deafheaven's new song sounds a helluva lot like New Bermuda – and I'm not the only one thinks that about the widely-praised "Magnolia." To be fair, the bar was pretty low. All Deafheaven had to do was drop a song with screaming in it, and it would've been heralded as a bright return to form for the blackgaze icons, who notably stripped 99% percent of the "black" from their sound on 2021's smooth, flavorless Infinite Granite.

The only thing I like about that album is that it seems to be weirdly polarizing within the Deafheaven fanbase. Some people genuinely like that they brazenly ripped off Nothing for a whole record, which is at least interesting to talk about. "Magnolia," on the other hand, is actually interesting to listen to. It's heavy as fucking shit. There're no clean vocals. No shoegazey or post-rocky breathers. It's galloping charges and neck-snapping grooves the whole way through, and the riffs are so syncopated and tonally brusque that you can tell Deafheaven are making a point to remind us that they haven't gone soft.

"Magnolia" isn't particularly memorable as a song. Sure, it's heavy, but that's about it. The reason New Bermuda worked is because it's catchy where it counts and blazingly heavy everywhere else. This checks one of those boxes – and one that the scream-less, blastbeat-less Infinite Granite failed to tick entirely. Let's see if Lonely People With Power follows the New Bermuda blueprint and includes enough Wilco twang to counterbalance the Wolves in the Throne Room fang.

Jivebomb - "Survival Ain't Taught"

If you're going to be a hardcore band who makes music videos, at least make them look cool. I think a lot about the Magnitude "Of Days Renewed" music video, and how utterly pointless it was. Just dudes jumping around in a dark room. It's totally divorced from what makes Magnitude special – straight-edge symbolism, huge pile-ups at their shows, the communal interplay of their music. Jivebomb's video for "Survival Ain't Taught" is the opposite. It's fucking cool. It encapsulates all of the extra-musical style that make Jivebomb such a fun band to watch live and root for. Frontperson Kat Madeira is thrashing around in front of giant square of lights that look like exposed speaker cones. In other scenes, the band are rocking out in an all-white room while a lowrider bounces nonchalantly in between them. Somehow, it's not corny or ostentatious. It's just fucking cool.

The song also rips. I've seen Jivebomb more than most hardcore bands in the 2020s. The Baltimore group have toured their asses off since dropping their Primitive Desires EP in 2022, coming through Pittsburgh at least five or six times since then. Primitive Desires was good but not great. The title-track has a great refrain, but otherwise, the songs – gnarled, punky, sheathed in echo – weren't doing anything that GEL weren't simultaneously doing better. Jivebomb always exceled in the live setting, though, and the last time I saw them (playing to 30-some people in a small DIY spot) they played a bunch of new material that got me hyped. "Survival Ain't Taught" might've been one of them. It's heavier than Jivebomb have ever sounded. There's an actual mosh part you can spinkick to. Madeira's vocals are fucking disgusting in the best way. Sludgy, gurgling, deep, haunting. It's exactly where I hoped Jivebomb would go on their first full-length.

Hooky, Winter - "horseshoe"

I love Winter, the L.A. dream-pop songwriter whose last two albums are criminally underrated, and I love Hooky, the Philly chill-gaze duo who should be as big as George Clanton. So, of course I love "horseshoe," the first song from their new collab EP that drops next month via Julia's War. I love the way the tinfoil guitars are stacked slightly ajar like two magnets repelling. I love the rickety drum beat. I love Winter's balmy chirps peeking through the grayscale instrumentation like brave snowdrops making their spring debut on a sunny day in late March. Simple, cutesy, no-bullshit indie-pop that picnics in the grassy knoll between The Radio Dept. and Memory Cassette.

Momma - "I Want You (Fever)"

Two of my favorite rock albums of the last couple years are Bully's Lucky For You and Sunshy's i don't care what comes next. Momma's new song sounds like spreading each of those albums on slices of bread and then dramatically slapping them together to make a whimsically gooey PB&J. A sandwich that has all the sugary hooks, take-no-shit attitude, and lowkey pop-punk spunk of Bully, but also the honking shoegaze riffs of Sunshy, as well as their album's knack for sounding both chunky and nimble. This is the best song Momma have ever released. The kind of indie-pop song that's tailor-made to snap you out of whatever funk is ailing you.

2hollis - "afraid" (Feat. nate sib)

Popstar shit. Maybe it'll all be alright in the end type shit. Fuck, sunsets are lowkey gorgeous type shit. Damn, I miss my friends I haven't seen in years type shit. Happy that you're happy even though we've grown apart type shit. Do I even need to listen to guitar music again? type shit.

Subscribe to Chasing Sundays for $5/month to continue reading the final segment of each Chasing Fridays column, where I go in on an older record that I've recently been spending time with.

Furry Things - The Big Saturday Illusion