Glitterer’s newest LP Rationale brings the band to new heights with clever mixes of indie rock and post-punk/hardcore. With catchy lyrics, melodic riffs, and smooth synths, the D.C. heavy hitters remain grounded in their home scene and influences, while still branching out further and further. Upon their first listen of the album, fans will be eager to press replay.
Produced by Arthur Rizk (Ghostmane, Code Orange, Power Trip) who was involved in some way on all previous Glitterer records, Rationale feels new yet familiar. It is the most at home within their own sound the band has ever been.
Rationale is presented as the unique collaborative project of Ned Russin and the band’s newly added members. Alongside founding member, Russin, who has always spearheaded the band’s lyrics and instrumentals, new additions such as Nicole Dao (Keys), Jonas Farah (Drums), and Connor Morin (Guitar) move the band in a direction that could only be achieved as a unit. “I had a few different ideas of how to expand Glitterer,” Russin says, “but after spending a year practicing songs about loneliness by myself, I decided a cohesive band was the only way to go.”
As Glitterer’s new line-up took shape, new songs began to pour out and Rationale followed. “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.”
Russin is keen on giving out credit where it is due and even highlights publisher Martin Riker’s novel The Guest Lecture as inspiring the album’s title. In the novel, the protagonist known as “Ideology” delivers the quote: “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.”
Russin recalls one of the earliest ideas for a song on Rationale, appearing to him in the haze of a post-COVID world. “It’s My Turn,” which Russin says is about finding a job, highlights those mundane and anxiety-riddled moments which he set out to achieve in his lyrics. “A lot of the subsequent songs continued in that territory, wondering about what I should be doing, trying to figure out my ‘purpose,’ both philosophically and vocationally.”
Glitterer hits the nail on the head with Rationale, an undeniably solid staple in the band’s discography. Fans and listeners can stream the full record today, February 23rd, and should be sure to catch the band live on one of their upcoming tour dates which can be found on their Instagram and Twitter.
