Chasing Fridays: daine, hardcore check-in, Threshold Q&A, more

A few things at the top before getting into this week's Chasing Fridays.

1) ICYMI, I'm now publishing a longform piece every Tuesday: a Q&A, a playlist, a list, an essay – the format will vary week to week. This week, I ran a lengthy interview with Colin Young, host of the HardLore podcast, member of a dozen hardcore bands (Twitching Tongues, God's Hate), and the owner of a couple record labels. The response to this interview has been tremendous, and I'd like to welcome the many new subscribers who are right now receiving their first Chasing Fridays in their inbox.

2) I reported on a new Live Nation-owned venue that just opened in Pittsburgh. Some sources are stoked on it, others not so much. Read my story for the Pittsburgh City Paper.

3) The good folks at HearHear.fm just formally launched their app/site this week. It's basically Letterboxd for concerts, and there's already a couple thousand people on there logging their shows and chit-chatting about music. It's a cool place on an increasingly less cool internet. Check it out.

And now for this week's Chasing Fridays, my weekly roundup of criticism, live reports, bloggy thoughts, and a Q&A. In this edition, I reviewed the dreadful new daine album and a mediocre shoegaze record that convinced me a large segment of the genre has hit a wall creatively. Then, I plugged a promising "bedroom-pop" act from Philly, and examined five new hardcore records that I think speak to what's happening across the genre right now. All of that is behind the paywall, but in the Chasing Down Q&A section, which anyone can read, I interviewed Isaac Eiger of Threshold, who's sneakily becoming a major force in the contemporary indie – and pop! – landscape. You know what to do...

Chasing Down

Isaac Eiger
of
Threshold, Voyeur, Strange Ranger

Chasing Down is a Q&A series with artists, friends, and others of good taste.

I've been following Isaac Eiger's music for over a decade now. I first discovered his old band Sioux Falls in 2016, who released a long, winding indie-rock album that became immensely important to my college friend group. Then, Sioux Falls became the band Strange Ranger, and I followed their evolution from slowcore to trip-hop to proto-cloud-rock, which is when they broke up and Eiger started his own project Threshold, releasing a beguiling, hard-to-pin-down pop album in 2024 called Thief. Around that time, he joined the noise-rock band Voyeur, and over the last few years he's co-written and/or produced for Adela, Frost Children, The Dare, Alex G, Chanel Beads, and many others. He gets around.

For this week's Chasing Down Q&A, I asked Eiger about the transition from Strange Ranger into Threshold, his defunct project Hollow Comet, working with Adela, his amazing new single "Stillwater," and much more.

Read the full interview below – and the 80+ others in the archive.

Tell me about the time period between Strange Ranger ending and Threshold beginning. I'm curious about that transitional point in your career. Did this feel like a spiritual successor to the type of songwriting you were doing in SR, or does Threshold feel very different to you? 

It felt very different, but something I’d been wanting to do for a while. Strange Ranger played our last show in I think October of 2023 and then the first Threshold song came out a month or two later. There was essentially no gap. Right when the band ended I started making the Threshold record.  

You were releasing some great electronic music as Hollow Comet at the beginning of the 2020s that presaged some of the sounds you explored on Thief. What happened to Hollow Comet? 

I got pretty sick of making electronic music at a certain point.  I’d spent a few years really obsessed with the DAW and then totally burned out on that. The last two Hollow Comet songs were piano songs and those are sort of like the first Threshold songs from my perspective. The name also started feeling a bit dumb and I wanted a clean slate. I’ve always liked artists who use lots of different names.  

Strange Ranger was a band that basically reinvented itself on every album. It felt very "twenty-something" in that sense; the band's sound/aesthetic changing in succession with your guys' own, radically evolving tastes. Do you have a more cohesive and/or focused idea of what you want Threshold to be? 

I think those years involved a misunderstanding between myself and the music. I often thought we were doing something totally different than what we actually were. When in certain moments that would become clear, I blamed it on the audience or my collaborators when in fact it was entirely my fault. 

If you spend too much time conceptualizing you become totally alienated from the actual reality of what you’re making. When I make songs now, I try to let things happen naturally and in this way it’s most similar to the Sioux Falls record which for a long time I hated but now I actually have a respect for.    

"Stillwater"...what a song. Did that just fall out of you or were you aiming for a specific style or songwriting archetype with that one? Any particular reference points? 

That song happened very quickly which is usually how it’s gone for anything decent I’ve been able to make. Speaking for myself, anytime a song feels like a puzzle, it’s a bad song. I wrote that one all at once and then a few months later felt like the chords weren’t right so I changed them around a bit. 

You co-wrote/co-produced Adela's "Marijuana," which is the only song I like on that album lol. What was the vision for that song and what was it like to work with a genuine popstar? 

My friend Liam brought me into the session when I was in L.A. last summer. At the time, she was probably 1/100th as famous as she is now and it was wild to see her explode. I feel lucky that she included the song on the album. I really like making music in that setting if the right people are involved. In the studio making the song, everybody felt really excited and that’s a blessing.

Who are your favorite producers in the underground right now? I'm keeping that broad intentionally, so include whoever comes to mind. 

I’m not really sure pure-producer-wise but as far as musicians who seem self-sufficient I like all the stuff everyone likes. I think Worldpeace DMT is really good.  I was really into the gospel type songs on the mixtape they put out a few months ago. I just found out about Rockie Rode and have been listening to her album a lot. I had a friend Ari Solus who makes insane music in Oakland. He may have taken down his YouTube channel but you can find it if you look around.