Green and Glass is a Brooklyn-based group fronted by Lucia Stavros on the harp, with Cuddle Magic’s David Flaherty (drums), Landlady’s Ryan Dugre (bass), Andrew McGovern (trumpet), and the multi-instrumental talents of Secret Sibling’s Sam Decker in support. The result is a sound pitched somewhere between chamber and synth pop, the lush intricacy of the arrangements lending an ethereal and often strange atmosphere through which Stavros’s vocals can drift.
Ahead of their self-titled debut on 11A Records, Green and Glass put out their first single ’14 Hours’ a few months ago. Built upon a bed of lapping harp, the track starts out with a shimmering dream pop aesthetic, but soon unfurls into something more complex and angular. Developing this unpredictable, skewed sound, the band capture the ‘dream’ in dream pop with a higher degree of verisimilitude, defying the conventions of the field in order get closer to the strange reality of dreams. For rather than the lush, gauzy blankets of sound so familiar to the genre, Green and Glass offer a soundscape both enticing and peculiar, a world capable of being both thrilling and ominous that is never set on any single path.
Today we’re honoured to share a brand new single, ‘Black Hole’. Unfolding from restrained yet eerie opening, where a subtle swell of synths hum behind the harp and gentle drums, the track possesses a vaguely sinister air, its languorous flow barely masking a sense of threat. There is no climax or ultimate manifestation of this foreboding, but things grower weirder as the song develops. Stavros’s vocals waver between croon and warning, and at one point the synths rise into a swell reminiscent of Au Revoir Simone. Periodically, horns skitter and streak across the canvas with an unhinged edge, as though something has gone wrong within the workings of this world, a malfunction which registers as blips and glitches, anomalies in the fabric of things.
The sound lives up to the conditions in which it was crafted. “[‘Black Hole’] was conceived after I observed video of ISIL fighters decapitating hostages in 2015,” Stavros explains. “I wondered how one could become so deeply entrenched in an ideology that one could commit such a violent and depraved act.” This is not earth-shattering violence, not for us, safe as we are at our privileged vantage, protected by the distance that television or the internet provide. No, this is ambiguous violence, the violence behind the surface, the dark matter to the familiar substance of our world. Inexplicable, unseen, but with its own weight and force. The shadows that say, what if things have somehow gone awry?
Check out the video with art by Noah D’Orazio below:
Green and Glass is set for release on the 14th February via 11A Records and you can pre-order it now from Bandcamp. There’s also a single release show at the Mercury Lounge on Sunday 8th December and you can find more information on Facebook.
