“The work of Tuxis Giant has experienced a turn towards the quiet since 2018’s Here Comes the Wolf,” we wrote back in 2023 when covering the album The Old House. A change “we’ve followed through the intimate searching of Goldie and last year’s EP In Heaven which has deep roots in a period spent in a remote Vermont cabin during the initial stages of the pandemic,” we continued, “as though, in isolation, Matt O’Connor found the requisite peace and space to work through the most personal of questions, and Tuxis Giant’s music came to mirror this hushed introspection.” The Old House further developed this style, combining the pleasure of returning to something familiar with the unnerving sense of unbelonging. What we described as a “nostalgic alienation,” where isolation begins to reveal its shadowed underside, the surrounding wilderness full of beauty, mystery and lurking dread.
Now Tuxis Giant has returned with You Won’t Remember This, a brand new full-length released via Worry Bead Records which both continues the themes explored across this sequence of albums and expands their sonic palette. With the help of familiar bandmates Eleanor Elektra (lead guitar, vocals), Fenn Macon (bass) and James Steinberg (drums), O’Connor pushes the Tuxis Giant sound further beyond its alt-country origins without losing the spirit of the project, returning once more to isolation to bring it to life. “This album was a big, collaborative labor of love,” they describe. “We wrote it together, arranged it live, and recorded it in the dead of winter, pummelled by snow squalls in a house with a shoddy wiring.”
The result very much follows in the same lineage as its more restrained predecessors, though reaches further afield for inspiration. O’Connor lists Smog, Yo La Tengo, Uncle Tupelo and even the films of Hayao Miyazaki as touchstones, and the variation is apparent from the diversity across the tracklist. Songs such as opener ‘Simple Days’ feel like a transition from the previous album, its soft, intimate folk arrangement punctuated with moments of rising intensity, a style which serves to charge the ostensibly mundane imagery of its lyrics (making the bed, frying onions in a pan) with an urgent fondness. ‘Holy Water’ is no less warm though more reflective in tone, its slower rhythm carrying a wistful edge. ‘Days’ on the other hand skips with something more agitated, ‘Trying to be Numb’ gestures towards an almost slacker-esque vibe and ‘Silver Cup’ is downbeat in an altogether more brooding manner, even if its message is one of affirming conviction.
But more than a lesson in testing the borders of a project, the invention and experimentation seen across You Won’t Remember This serves its ultimate intention. That is, to paint a picture of life as it is lived, a full spectrum of moods, the shades shifting day to day. And moreover, something experienced not only as the immediate present but also a constant retrospection, memories appearing, merging and changing as the months pass by, each colouring our outlook at any given moment. The album’s most autobiographical song ‘Heart Surgery’ encapsulates all of this in one track. A retelling of the day O’Connor’s mother underwent the titular operation, complete with stark emotion, naked concern and the small funny details which pop up no matter how serious the occasion. But it is also a meditation on memory. The things we remember, the things we do not, and how both of these might haunt or protect us as we grow and heal.
most memories of that day are gone
but a few linger onlike my dad cracking jokes
and my brother glued to his phonewhen the doctor appeared, we were insane
he had blood on his shoe“all’s well that ends well”
“a bird in hand is…”she was sitting up and talking
when the nurse said:
“you won’t remember this”
You Won’t Remember This is out now via Worry Bead Records and available via the Tuxis Giant Bandcamp page.
