It's a good day to be a glutenhead....
A mid-summer blast of passion and pageantry in the new song THE DIRT
Hey glutenhead newsletter!!!! I’m in a great mood because we just put out our first song since fall 2021. I sent an earlier version on one of these a while ago, but it’s come a LONG way since then. I’ve never had such an intimate and embattled relationship with a song before. we wrestled, we yelled, we embraced, and then finally, after over 2 years of working on it, we settled down and called it DONE. so here it is….
~~ The Dirt ~~
You can listen at this link wherever you get your music: link to stream The Dirt
I wanted to talk a bit about the song here. We were trying to make something new, something real and raw, with spirit bursting outwards from all angles. The Dirt is us trying our best to not hold anything back. It started as a little folk song, here’s kind of a cringey video of us playing a really early version:
And then evolved and evolved. I had a strange Saturday afternoon in the winter of 2022 where I realized that the song wanted to be bigger and bolder and wanted to say more. I was thinking of those dramatic multi-part (almost proggy?) pop punk songs that I used to love as a kid like Jesus of Suburbia and Welcome to the Black Parade. And also the ones I liked later like Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales and the back half of Worry. I fleshed out the sections more and brought it to the band, who brought it to life. Everyone came up with their own parts and helped mold each others’. This is really a glutenhead full band song. We tracked the band playing it live off the floor at Port William Sound in Eastern Ontario that summer and then I spent 8 months at home glued to my ableton project adding layers, warping stuff, obsessing over details, recording things, adding effects, taking away effects, crashing my computer, crashing it again, etc, etc. By the time I got it to Alex Gamble to mix the song, it sounded pretty much like a wall of noise. Then we had the fun job of combing through the mess I had made and shaping it into what you hear. It almost drove me into the sky but it was a blast. We mixed the song in dolby atmos spatial audio because it let us play with space and gave us more room to create the different worlds that the song wades through. It also allowed us to fit everything we wanted in there.
I think that The Dirt is the sound of the band coming into our own, the purest distillation of our ethos and sonic palate. Its a blend Jewish mysticism, indie rock, and alt-country, with glimmers of klezmer, Irish folk, emo, post-punk, and hyperpop. It explores the confrontations between heritage and the demands of the modern secular world, but more generally, its about dualities and paradoxes, the ways they populate our fantasies, identities, and relationships. heritage and modernity, softness and rigitidy, rationality and intuition, existence and non existence, the divine and the earthly, the harsh and the gentle, the spirit and the material, the ocean and the dirt. this one (and the rest of the songs we have coming out TBA) was made alongside the process of me reconnecting with my jewish heritage over the past few years and it's imbued with a sort of mystical air. or maybe not, might have to just listen and find out.I’m trying to understand what it means to connect with my Jewish ancestry and traditions of Jewish mysticism while inside a brain that has been brought up in our hyper-rationalist cultural milieu. Lyrically, the song is searching for some kind of divine connection, and in doing that I think it also finds itself longing for communal and personal connection in a time that feels alienating and isolating for me and so many other people around me.
Anyway, we very much hope you like it! seriously! if it’s your thing, take a minute out of your day and play it loud!!!! send it to ur friends, put it in ur group chats, discord, myspace, club penguin, reddit, whatever u use!! add it to ur playlists!!! email it around!! we are so proud of this one and I think you can hear that in the song. THE DIRT!!!
another thing —> come see us play in Toronto (July 20), Hamilton (July 13), London (July 22), or Montreal (July 29)!!!! will be giving more info on these soon!! Tickets are already on sale for the toronto and hamilton dates here.
big love,
Ben