From the opening beats of Glorybots’ latest single, “Ache Rain,” to the just about alien cry of the devices and vocals 5 minutes later within the single’s concluding moments, it’s clear that the post-punk alt-rock band has taken its sound to a brand new stage. Glorybots is ready to launch its fourth LP, mad.finish, this spring. The primary single is already accessible on all streaming platforms, inviting listeners to the band’s darkish, futuristic rock aesthetic with its atmospheric mix of post-punk, various rock, and digital components. Two extra singles are anticipated to drop within the coming months.
The Highway to Glorybots
Glorybots is the brainchild of lead singer and songwriter Ethan Drone, who grew up listening to Brazilian people music and ’80s and ’90s bands starting from Depeche Mode, 9 Inch Nails, and The Treatment, to Tones on Tail, Love and Rockets, Smashing Pumpkins, Radiohead, and others. Ethan has written six albums (4 with Glorybots); his earlier gig was the Seattle-based rock band Echo Texture, which as soon as opened for Dandy Warhols. He has performed the bass, electrical, and acoustic guitars, the keyboard, the piano, and the ukulele. “I’ll try to play any musical instrument I can get my arms on,” Ethan shares, “however probably the most attention-grabbing instrument I’ve ever performed at a reside present is the berimbau, a single-stringed percussion instrument (resembling an archer’s bow), that I purchased in Brazil. The berimbau is performed by hanging the string with a stick whereas modulating notes through placement of a rock in opposition to the string.”
Brazil, residence of the berimbau, is the place Ethan spent his adolescence in early childhood. The remainder of his youth was spent in Southern Cal, however he has additionally lived in cities throughout America (he’s at present in Seattle) and has traveled to over 30 nations, from Nepal to South Africa to Thailand. He as soon as met Paulo Coelho, writer of worldwide bestseller The Alchemist, on a avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and as a youth, he met Daniel Ash (singer of Love and Rockets) when he received caught making an attempt to sneak onto their tour bus at considered one of their exhibits.
Ethan established Glorybots a couple of years earlier than the COVID-19 pandemic in a want to jot down music that will mix edgy, digitized components with basic analog band sounds. Ethan puzzled what might need developed if early Treatment had continued to create music within the vein of Japanese Whispers, and he needed to fuse the sound he imagined with the kind of otherworldly components explored by goth bands like Tones on Tail.
How Glorybots’ Sound Has Developed
Glorybots’ first album, Darkish Alien Pop, tried that fusion and was met with enthusiasm by critics and followers, but it surely lacked the post-punk swagger Ethan needed to attain. Glorybots’ second album, Invisible, introduced the swagger with a extra guitar-driven sound, and the third album, Radiation Skies, introduced a extra severe rock efficiency of Ethan’s imaginative and prescient, leaving critics praising the album for capturing “the famous indie act sounding extra divinely in contact with the medium than ever earlier than.”
Reflecting on the journey, Ethan shares what he feels held him again in earlier years. “I used to suffocate my music by making an attempt to steer it in a particular path,” he remarks. “Sometimes, this was delimited by the path of one thing beforehand recognized (just like the model or sound of one other artist or band) … I now attempt to keep out of the best way and simply let the music stream in no matter path it takes, whether or not that’s in the end perceived as “good” or “unhealthy” by anybody. …To paraphrase David Bowie, should you’re making music that doesn’t make you barely uncomfortable, you then’re in all probability not creatively the place you should be.”
What mad.finish Delivers
The upcoming LP, mad.finish, completes that rejection of predefined kinds and delivers an genuine, uncooked, and delightfully unusual sound in a compelling presentation, with lyrics infused with thriller, depth, and compulsion. Its track preparations are much less conventional, but nonetheless enable the fantastic thing about analog instrumentation to stream by means of on the proper moments. The general message is considered one of hope; “Not the hope of some platform, treatise, or agenda,” Ethan shares, “the hope of the human type in all that we will obtain.” mad.finish is a breathless celebration of human creativity and potential.mad.finish will probably be out in Spring 2025; you could find the only Ache Rain now in your streaming platform of alternative, with two extra singles about to drop. You can too comply with the band for information of what’s subsequent on Instagram, Fb, or BlueSky.
