Glare

When you hear music like this—the wild, loose and woozy drags of guitar; the impossible beauty of it all—what kind of landscape presents itself in your mind? Vistas big enough to be forgotten in. Deserts which stretch back to the beginning of time. Infinite horizons melting into pink bokehs. It’s Texas, isn’t it?

Formed in 2017 in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, Glare aren’t so much genre traditionalists as they are painters of wide realms and intense moods. The four-piece band has already accumulated a large audience, both in the flesh with their reputation for sell-out shows, and on the internet, a place where people go to short-circuit feelings through their screens.

Sunset Funeral, the band’s debut LP, is a fog of dreamy grief, where feeling supersedes language. It’s music, as guitarist Toni Ordaz puts it, “for people who don’t know how to talk about how they feel.” An album that’s been years in the making, Sunset Funeral is a document of unspeakable grief, charting the process of mourning and how it travels through our subconscious and dreams.

One of the great charms of Sunset Funeral, and of Glare overall, is how they approach such a large, celestial sound with humble materials. Among the shoegaze revivalists, Glare come to the canvas with a more resourceful, DIY perspective than many of their peers. Glare’s music is too sublime, too huge to sound like it came from any kind of manmade instrument, tiny amp box or otherwise.

On first listen, Sunset Funeral—which scans as vast as desert sand—may overwhelm the senses. But look closer, and you’ll find a multiplicity of heavily crushed textures, treasures. ‘Guts’, with its sweetly chugging guitar line, dissolves the borders between bliss and despair. ‘2 Soon 2 Tell’, one of the album’s most gauzily romantic tracks, is both tense and transcendent. Nü Burn, a crunchy and lilting number, harkens back to the band’s grittier hardcore roots. But even when they deign to go hard, you can hear a softening in Glare’s sound compared to any of their previous releases, as well as an attempt to lean into more traditional pop song structures. The music drifts heavenward, to be sure, though it’s still tethered down by steady foundations. It’s beautiful. It’s humid. It’s delirious. It’s music made by people whose feelings speak louder than their words.