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- Summary: The first new full-length studio release from Boston shoegaze band Drop Nineteens in 30 years was recorded in Boston, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
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- Record Label: Wharf Cat Records
- Genre(s): Pop/Rock
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Score distribution:
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Positive: 11 out of 13
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Mixed: 2 out of 13
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Negative: 0 out of 13
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Nov 3, 2023It’s a Christmas morning of an album, each track a new gift to treasure. It’s a set of songs that bring you deep into them, a mist of musical vapor in which snapshot reminiscences can be made out as the fog wavers.
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Nov 7, 2023Even if Hard Light is more homogenous than Delaware, it retains the group’s interest in always finding a different tonality, skipping from one genre or influence to another and conceiving genuine hit material.
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MojoDec 13, 2023It's an impressively elegant and expressive one. [Feb 2024, p.87]
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Nov 3, 2023It’s a smoother ride than Delaware, for better or for worse, but not without edges. Drop Nineteens have not lost all of their style; if anything, they’ve gained some finesse. It was never supposed to happen, but we should be glad that it has.
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Nov 6, 2023While the textures of shoegaze are everywhere, the closest thing to a shoegaze song is “Rose With Smoke,” a spare, guitar-only instrumental that acts as an intermission. Everywhere else, the band sounds locked in and linked together—if you want to catch the sense of play, just focus on Zimmerman’s giddy basslines—and the result is the kind of slow-release euphoria you get from an afternoon catching up with old friends.
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Nov 14, 2023All told, this is an album which will almost certainly be enjoyable if you like kinda hazy, kinda ethereal, kinda catchy indie/alt thingamajigs, but it’s also an album desperately lacking the hint of an edge which would give the total product further potency. Even so, it’s a solid comeback from another crew of aging shoegazers, just don’t set your expectations too high.
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Nov 3, 2023In shearing off that thorniness, Drop Nineteens have returned as a highly competent, often lovely, and perhaps less interesting version of themselves.