MILLY

“A blend of the woozy, guitar-driven vulnerability of Swervedriver and the noise-laden introspection of Nineties post-hardcore trailblazers Hum” Rolling Stone

“Fuzzy, shoegaze with a hint of sorrow” NME

“A fuzz-laden jammer that re-envisages J Mascis at the head of a dream pop outfit” Clash

“Crawling tempos and dazed, cinematic lo-fi… a band to watch” Paste

“Now Hear This” The Independent

“Nonchalant, shoegazey instalment” Gigwise

“The Austin 100” NPR

“Milly perfectly capture the emotional essence of 90s alt rock and shoegaze” Beats Per Minute

Today, Los Angeles band MILLY release their highly anticipated debut album Eternal Ring, set for release via cult indie label Dangerbird Records (Grandaddy, Swervedriver). Produced in LA with Gleemer’s Corey Coffman, Eternal Ring is kinetic, physical, and often a little bit volatile — a mixture of emo music and 90s-indebted indie that tastes as if it’s been fermenting for years, feeding on itself until it becomes something new entirely. 

A profound first full-length statement from Brendan Dyer and his closest collaborator, bass player Yarden Erez, it’s a record that takes the anxiety of modern-day America and filters it through a prismatic, powerfully individualistic lens, resulting in something intense, bracing, and deeply modern. This is Milly with the fat trimmed and the frayed edges cut off. “Everything that we're doing now was there but I feel like we just let it marinate a little longer or something — it feels a lot more focused now” says Dyer.

To understand Eternal Ring, you have to go back to Dyer’s childhood. Learning guitar and drums from his uncle, a musician, from the age of ten, Dyer was one of the only young people in his rural Connecticut town interested in anything other than sports and other stereotypical markers of American life. Naturally, Dyer began to gravitate towards emo — the closest thing many teens have to outsider art — as an art form he could identify with, bands like Hawthorne Heights subconsciously laying the groundwork for the music he would make as an adult. “It probably only lasted a year or two that I was interested in that sort of thing, but now I feel like it's become a thing in my life where it's like, full circle,” he says. “When we were writing this album, and touring before writing this album, I was reconnecting with a lot of the music that I was listening to in my youth and realizing that there was a reason why I liked this music so much.”

The MILLY of Eternal Ring, though, is a vastly different project from the one Dyer began in his childhood bedroom. Where the band’s old songs were dazed and gorgeously laconic, Eternal Ring is muscular, punchy, almost alarmingly direct. You only need to hear album opener and debut single “Illuminate” to understand the change: slipping quickly from emo balladry into something heavy and intoxicatingly intense, it’s a clear marker that this is the work of a tighter, more dynamic MILLY. There is no slack to these songs — even the nine-minute “Stuck In The Middle” is an impossibly taut endurance work, jumping from emotive build to gut-wrenching squall in a second.