Chasing Fridays: ear, easterlin, Clarion Q&A, more

By the time you're reading this, I'll be in New York City seeing Chapterhouse, Hum, Nothing, Swirlies, Lovesliescrushing, and a half-dozen other awesome shoegaze bands at this year's Slide Away festival. Next week, I'll be at both dates of Slide Away Chicago, and then the following week I'll be documenting the fest's L.A. edition. The next couple weeks of this newsletter will probably be pretty heavy on Slide Away-related happenings. I'll be doing some video coverage of the fest that you can see by following Chasing Sundays on IG, and I'll provide some additional writings about what I see and hear in this newsletter. Hope you like shoegaze!

In the spirit of my travels, I wrote about a bunch of shoegaze for this week's Chasing Fridays. I reviewed music by Gol Olímpico and easterlin, and then interviewed viral shoegaze breakouts Clarion about their swift come-up and new EP, Blue Fairy. I also wrote about an amazing new song by ear, one of the coolest bands in the world. Hope ya find something new.

ear - "Ne Plus Ultra"

One of the reasons I find the video footage of ear rocking out at the MoMA's 50th birthday celebration so entertaining is the juxtaposition between their recorded output and their live presentation. The laptop-twee stars make certified headphone music with miniature beats and delicate dynamics and barely muttered vocals. At least they did until "Ne Plus Ultra." The duo's latest cut is probably their most accessible and definitely their most bangin' yet; the type of song that illustrates why ear are, for all their indie coziness, beloved by Instagram rap accounts and included in a Spotify playlist cringily titled "hyp3r.wav".

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In "Ne Plus Ultra," Jonah Paz and Yaelle Avtan still sing under their breaths like they're trying not to get caught in a game of hide and seek, but the beat on this track doesn't immediately contract as soon as it reaches a physically imposing volume level. All of ear's songs up to this point dangled a 2hollis-tier synth drop in front of their listeners without ever letting them have it. It was almost frustrating how coy their debut album could be, but that edging tension is precisely what made their music such an alluring reaction against he banal omnipresence of gratuitous pleasure. "Ne Plus Ultra" is ear's "thank you" for those who stuck it out. The whole second half of the song is a generously squeaky, squelchy, rattling trap beat. Perfect for headbanging in venerated fine art institutions. And also just perfect.

Gol Olímpico - "respirar en cuadro"

Gol Olímpico are a band from Monterrey, Mexico who describe themselves on Bandcamp as "emo mexicano," and their new song, "respirar en cuadro," notably features César “Kar” Cossio of Mexican emo vets Insite. Interestingly, I wouldn't call this song emo, which is probably why I like it so much. "respirar en cuadro" is a six-minute post-rock voyage that reminds me of Sigur Ros, Parannoul, and Deafheaven's least screamiest moments all thrown into a blender. It's aching, epic, panoramic – all sorts of adjectives you'd use to describe a song with vast stretches of pictorial guitar spreading atop lethargically murmured vocals. "Shoegaze" is another one of those adjectives.

easterlin - reverb claymore

There's so much insanely good underground rock coming out of Florida right now that I think a state-wide scene report is in order. The Southeastern territory has had a grip on the hardcore zeitgeist all decade, and now bands like soap box derby and easterlin are designing a regional shoegaze style with heavy screamo overtones. Visually and production-wise, Miami's easterlin are clearly indebted to Florida noise-gaze alumni Her New Knife, but last year's reverb claymore EP distinguishes themselves from the JWAR pack with volcanic riffing that verges on something heavier than shoegaze.

The band actually go there with closer "misery in fields of bliss," a straight-up screamo rager encased in tangles of barbed-wire distortion. It's a cool conclusion that doesn't clash genre-wise because of how foreboding the tracks that come before it are. "letter from july" smolders with the right amount of Swirlies ashiness, and "homeli" is the rare modern 'gaze track that reaches back beyond Loveless to recall the pulverizing thrust of You Made Me Realise. I'm not sure how easterlin evaded my radar for so long. They did a few dates with Glixen last fall, in addition to playing a show with quannnic, and their streams are pretty significant. Oh well. All that matters is that they're in my sights now.

Chasing Down

Anthony Sanchez
of
Clarion

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

I genuinely didn't think we'd get another viral shoegaze song this decade, but the internet's appetite for the genre remains insatiable. California two-piece Clarion just dropped a new EP called Blue Fairy back in March, but their 2024 song "Hello Juliet" is currently blowing up on TikTok and beyond. It's a spry, springy grunge-gaze banger with a catchy indie-pop chorus and guitar leads that kind of remind me of Title Fight. I can see why it's a hit, and I can see why Clarion's fans are eating them up on their ongoing, mostly sold-out tour. They're energetic, they're hooky, and they don't sound like most of the other shoegaze bands who are currently trendy.

For this week's Chasing Down Q&A, I asked Clarion guitarist Anthony Sancheez about how they went viral, their unforeseen association with manga fandom, their very un-shoegazey influences, wall of deaths at their shows, and more. Read the full interview below – and the 50-plus others in the archive, with a new one added each week.