Pop and rockInterviewCult punks Glassjaw return: 'It was offensive. You don’t talk to a woman like that'
Daniel Montesinos-DonaghyThe post-hardcore band were loved for their knotty, emotional songs – and despised for their misogynistic lyrics. As they release their first album for 15 years, are they changed men?
It has taken 15 years for Glassjaw’s Daryl Palumbo and Justin Beck to make a new album. In between, there have been health troubles (Palumbo’s struggles with Crohn’s disease have cancelled many a UK tour), side-projects with ex-Gorillaz mastermind Dan the Automator, business endeavours, marriage, children, life. Finally, as 2017 wound down, they planned to announce their oft-rumoured third album, a thank you surprise to their loyal, patient fans. Then Amazon ruined the surprise by posting the album listing online.
“We were a little bummed because Amazon kind of spoiled the ending,” says Beck, calling from a tour bus, describing it “like watching The Sixth Sense and somebody telling me [the ending] within the first five seconds of watching.” The frustration is audible in his voice, but it’s delivered with a what-you-gonna-do shrug.
Forming the band in 1993 in Long Island’s fertile hardcore scene, Palumbo and Beck were inspired to make music in accordance with the quickly evolving, psychedelic-yet-aggro bands playing lunchtime shows at punk haven CBGBs. After multiple lineup stop-and-starts, the duo expanded to five members for two albums that stand as classics of early-00s post-hardcore: 2000’s debut Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Silence and 2002’s Worship and Tribute.
They took familiar elements from 90s alternative rock and morphed them into something simultaneously messier and more precise. Beck’s guitars were played more for texture than riffs, while the resulting cacophony was ruled over by the charismatic Palumbo, a frontman who would switch from shrieking fury to crooning mystique at the drop of a hat.
The anthemic Worship and Tribute was released on Warner Bros, which opened them up to an international audience while keeping them in what they call “a perpetual contract debt” allegedly worth $1.4m. When asked for more info as to how they got out, Palumbo only says: “You can’t say A, B and C, but you get to be off the label.”
After two albums dropped in quick succession, the trail went cold – members left, Palumbo formed (many) other bands, Beck worked with the MerchDirect company he founded. Meanwhile, the cult of Glassjaw grew amongst legions of emo and hardcore fans, each show or EP followed by whispers of that third album. Now free of their contract, they have returned with Material Control, a feral update of the bands that inspired them as straight-edge teenagers, unknowns such as Stillsuit, Orange 9mm and Kiss It Goodbye. They say the album is “acute”, “urgent” and “ignorant” – in other words, heavy.
One could excuse the band for indulging the anticipation surrounding a new album with bells and whistles, but Material Control is incredibly streamlined. Self-produced, it was recorded quickly, according to Beck: “It wasn’t done in one collective window, so we would do it after hours – after baby time, after family time.”
“It was quite a quick process to make,” echoes Palumbo. “Granted, it feels like 10 years.”
The new album is intriguingly free of the artier lyrics of their previous albums, which added to their mystique among emo diehards (Sample past Palumbo lyric: “Am I driftwood or hosanna? I’m a knee deep in disease”). “There was a lot of babble – a lot of incoherent diary entry stuff going on,” Palumbo says. On Material Control, however, “there’s a simplicity ... the fat is trimmed.”
Accusations of misogyny have dogged the band since their debut, which contained Palumbo’s furious lyrics about the fall of an adolescent relationship (“You filthy whore/Shut up and swallow my pride for me”; “I only beat you when I’m drunk/You’re only pretty when you’re crying”). When asked about the group’s legacy, Palumbo sighs, knowing what I’m referring to.
“It deserves scrutiny,” he says. “You don’t talk to a woman like that. It took being that angry to write [the debut album’s lyrics], to make it work for my instrument in the band. I was always like ‘Argh, revenge!’ Fall in love easily and then fall into hate easily. I didn’t have to say it that way ... It’s stupid, you don’t speak face-to-face to a woman like that. I was angry. It’s offensive.”
As older, woker men, their concerns have turned to the topics that make Material Control as thoughtful as it is blistering. Against the 90s-inspired sonics, Palumbo’s lyrics wonder about a future that is sometimes apocalyptic. “Dust to dust/Man to maker,” he yells over the hellfire of Pompeii. Sometimes, it’s just boring, as depicted on the provocatively titled New White Extremity: “I’m searching for a familiar face in my surroundings.” Beck is blunter about their rapidly gentrifying hometown: “Modern New York ain’t shit. Downtown Brooklyn is white people from Kansas. It ain’t cool.”
Reconsidering the New York of their youth has allowed Glassjaw to not only create that mythical third LP but, most surprisingly, moulded them into the band they always wanted to be. “Our tastes lie in that era and those sensibilities, that type of songwriting,” says Palumbo. “Our last two albums, sonically ... they are what they are. But I think we’re really getting to sound like what we ...” Beck finishes his sentence, the yin to his yang since 1993: “Set out to do.”
“I feel like we’re actually executing it,” Palumbo says, the 15-year wait put to rest. “And then some.”
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