Album of the Week: plastic death

Our first new album of 2024! Feels good. Not that Record Club necessarily needs to focus on new albums or whatever. But I think the rare week that we start in on an album that just came out two days prior, those weeks feel different. It feels like Record Club is blazing a path instead of looking back at those who came before. Something like that, I don't know. In any case, listen to the damn music, and send in those damn reviews.

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WEEK 260 — January 21-27, 2024

plastic death

by glass beach

LISTEN:

Spotify | YouTube | Bandcamp | Apple

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PICKED BY NATE

NATE'S COMMENTS: "First glass beach album was an emo punk freakout condensing and collapsing the young online experience into one overflowing, overstuffed album of kitchen-sink rock. Will be fascinating to see how they go about following it up."

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ALBUM DETAILS

GENRE: bedroom pop, emo, post-emo, post-punk

RELEASED: January 9, 2024

LENGTH: 63:11

TRACKLIST:

1. coelacanth
2. motion
3. slip under the door
4. guitar song
5. rare animal
6. cul-de-sac
7. whalefall
8. puppy
9. the killer
10. the CIA
11. 200
12. comatose
13. abyss angel

LYRICS: Genius.com

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ARTIST DETAILS

PRONOUNS: J McClendon a.k.a. "Classic J" is they/them; Jonas Newhouse is they/she; William White is they/them; Layne Smith is he/him

ABOUT: glass beach (all lowercase) came together in through / in reaction to J McClendon's solo project, Casio Dad. In 2015ish, Jonas Newhouse and William White heard a song from a Casio Dad EP on the college radio station at the University of Minnesota Morris, and became friends with McClendon. They started glass beach. While they lived together in Los Angeles, they started glass beach, and released their first album in 2019. Layne Smith soon joined, originally to flesh out the live band, but then became a full-time member in the studio as well. According to The Washington Post, glass beach has "developed a cultish online following." After almost five years, they are finally ready to release their sophomore album.

DISCOGRAPHY: the first glass beach album came out in 2019. In between then and now, the weekend of the release of their second album, they released some one-off singles, plus a remix album.

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ADDITIONAL INFO

READING SOME SHIT: Uproxx has the first interview during this still-ongoing album cycle

WATCHING SOME SHIT: glass beach "live at Minecraft," whatever the hell that means

PREVIOUSLY ON RECORD CLUB: Will Yip produced the album. This will be the fifth RC album that Yip has produced, after Better EP, Piecing It Together, Hello Exile, and Patience. The Patience Sunday morning album write-up was actually the first time I included the "PREVIOUSLY ON RECORD CLUB" section, and that was because I had noticed that Will Yip had been on our radar multiple times. Nice to come back around full circle only a couple weeks prior to Record Club's fifth anniversary.

Some other miscellaneous connections: glass beach covered "Welcome to the Black Parade"; their name is the third RC artist to have the word "beach" in it, after the Beach Boys and the Beaches; their stated musical influences include Jeff Rosenstock and They Might Be Giants; glass beach, like fellow hyper-online band underscores, announced the new album via an alternate reality game on the internet.

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Happy listening, RC family!
Have a great week!