2022 saw the release of Horse Jumper of Love’s latest full-length, Natural Part, and now less than a year later, the band are back with an unexpected new release. Heartbreak Rules is a mini-album of sorts: a collection of eight completely fresh songs, two reimagined versions of standout tracks from Natural Part, and a cover of The Smashing Pumpkins classic, “Luna.” But the most striking thing about Heartbreak Rules is the volume–or more specifically, the lack of it. This is a sparse, intimate version of Horse Jumper of Love, one that forgoes the waves of fuzz and feedback, and instead highlights the indelible songwriting at the core of their music. 

Heartbreak Rules was written and recorded solely by vocalist/guitarist Dimitri Giannopoulos, but it is undeniably a Horse Jumper of Love release. “When I started writing, I didn’t really know what it would be,” he explains. “I went into it with no intentions.” Seeking a creative outlet during the pandemic, Giannopoulos decamped to the Catskills with engineer and longtime band collaborator, Bradford Kreeger, and the pair spent five days casually recording what would become Heartbreak Rules. “It was really fun, we were drinking heavily and grilling steaks,” Giannopoulos laughs, adding, “We only brought the bare minimum stuff: a practice amp, a midi keyboard, a very spare drum kit. The low key vibe just made the songs sound great to me because I knew I was in a good headspace.”

That laidback and peaceful feeling comes through in Heartbreak Rules’ hushed and unvarnished recordings, making the expert songcraft shine through even more. “As I play music more, I just want to play quieter,” Giannopoulos says. “We’re rehearsing these songs as a full band now and we’re not blasting our amps like we used to–it feels really good. I think it has to do with our confidence level at this point. I used to play loud because I wasn’t confident in my vocal delivery or my lyrics, and now I want to showcase those things.” 

The eight new songs on Heartbreak Rules accomplish just that, with the minimal arrangements and earworm melodies of the title track, “A Tune Drifts Out The Window,” or “Snake Eyes” metamorphosing  Giannopoulos into an otherworldly acoustic balladeer. Elsewhere, “Queenie’s Necklace” and “Pendulum” still manage to incorporate the elements of dissonance and tension that are essential to Horse Jumper of Love’s sound, now only made more effective by the sense of space and distance within the recordings. Giannopoulos provides his surrealist musings on family, friendship, vices, and the unpredictability of life–his voice and lyrics confidently upfront in the mix as he paints pictures with words just as vivid as the melodies that carry them.

Heartbreak Rules ends with the hazy cover of “Luna,” an early Horse Jumper of Love recording from nearly ten years ago. Unearthed from Giannopoulos’ collection of old Tascam tapes, the track is gauzy and relaxed, but also a fitting line between the band’s past and their future. “Recording these new songs sort of reminded me of how I used to do things. It was like a callback to how fun that looseness could be. These songs really just feel like they’re for me because they weren’t written with the studio or playing live in mind. There was no pressure around them.” Luckily these songs aren’t just for Giannopoulos, they’re the essential next step for Horse Jumper of Love and we all get to follow their Heartbreak Rules. 

A Korean producer/DJ who has made a name for himself in the future funk community through reworkings of ‘80s Japanese city pop, Showa-era songs, and Japanese style disco tunes. His re-edit of Mariya Takeuchi’s Plastic Love sparked an internet-based Japanese city pop revival in the U.S. and Europe.

From her early days, staying late after-hours at her video rental store job in Maine to record songs, to co-producing and arranging her four studio records, Aly Spaltro has remained focused on music that connects, empowers and builds community. She built her fanship the old-fashioned way, getting in front of audiences and projecting her poetic confessionals, silencing rowdy crowds with an a cappella opening song in the center of a dark stage. Spaltro was quick to develop a reputation as a breakout star in New England, and then expanded slowly outwards, moving to New York at twenty to continue work on the songs that would become Ripely Pine. Her voice has never wavered, has grown more honest and open with time, and anyone witnessing the long lines of fans seeking signatures after her performances can see how her work has impacted fans. Her live shows are revelations, a further deep dive into what makes Ripely Pine such a mainstay.

Spaltro is celebrating ten years of Ripely Pine with the release of a 5xLP Box Set, IN THE MAMMOTH NOTHING OF THE NIGHT out August 18 on Ba Da Bing Records. With the original songs remastered, as well as reams of additional material produced and arranged by Spaltro and mixed by original co- producer Nadim Issa, IN THE MAMMOTH NOTHING OF THE NIGHT captures the time, mood, art and ambition of Aly Spaltro in her early twenties, who had already accumulated years of playing and self-recording experience before laying down tracks for this giant of a debut.

“I wrote some of these songs when I was 18, learning how to play the instruments and record with my digital 8-track along the way,” Spaltro says, reflecting on the time. She talks about IN THE MAMMOTH NOTHING OF THE NIGHT with a sense of a mission. “These tracks have haunted me, because they haven’t had a home for all these years. I found all these alternate track listings in my notebooks. Any of them could have ended up on the record,” Spaltro says. “This box set is a way to honor that whole time, the beginning of the path of my life. Releasing this project feels like just that; I’m able to look back on where I’ve come from, and then gently close that door behind me and keep moving, keep growing.”

To emerge from a global pandemic with a renewed sense of situational awareness, hard won insight, and a new album is the kind of move we’ve come to expect from Thrice over the last twenty years. With Horizons/East, Dustin Kensrue and his bandmates address, with candor and courage, the fragile and awkward arrangements that pass for civilization, while inviting us to dwell more knowingly within our own lives. Without surrendering any of the energy and hard edge of their previous albums, they’ve given us a profoundly meditative work which serves as a musical summons to everyday attentiveness.

Since forming Thrice with guitarist Teppei Teranishi, bassist Eddie Breckenridge, and drummer Riley Breckenridge in 1998, Kensrue has never been one to back down from a mental fight. This mood is set by the opening synth-driven number “Color of the Sky,” which sounds well-suited to accompany the closing credits of the Stranger Things season finale. Think Flying Lotus giving way to Elbow and setting the listener down in a new dimension. A self-recorded effort, Horizons/East conveys a palpable sense of danger, determination, and possibility. Scott Evans (Sleep, Kowloon Walled City, Yautja, Town Portal) is on mixing duties, conjuring a landscape of gloom, glow, and glory.

On “Buried in the Sun,” which had the working title of “D.C. Bass,” the band’s fondness for bands like Fugazi and Frodus comes to the fore. In it we learn that there’s a military-industrial complex, a vast apparatus of legal bullying, to take on (I saw the fire on the television/the DoD or the CIA), but the threat to our mental health in acknowledging our own country’s participation in the terror trade is both immersive and interior. The psychic struggle will often come down to what we’re doing with our tools, how we hold what passes before our minds in dreams and on screens. There’s a lot to take in and a lot to be mad about, but Horizons/East invites us to slow tape and see.

Kensrue doesn’t believe, for instance, that Twitter can be blamed for what we bring to it: “It amplifies things. It can exacerbate things. But it isn’t creating anything on its own.” The task, it seems, is to follow the creative impulse into every corner, to hold reality at a better, more righteous angle, lest we misinterpret or project our own chaos on all incoming data. This is where the songs on Horizons/East function as epiphanies through which listeners are invited and equipped to conjure our own. An especially powerful example of this is “Summer Set Fire To Rain.”

“Summer Set Fire to the Rain” is the title, and repeated mantra, of the record’s fifth track. It’s something that popped out as the band was writing one day. “I sang it,” Kensrue recalls, “and thought…Well, that’s beautiful. I’m gonna keep that line.” From there, he applied it to the everyday-somewhere occurrence of getting stuck in the rain as sun shines. “The rain’s coming down and it actually can be beautiful, all these raindrops just lit up by the sun but….if you interpret it a certain way, you’re suffering now…You could miss that moment by worrying about getting wet.” Later, over the already interlacing melodies of guitar, bass and vocals, in the final chorus the band threads a new melody in the mix as Kensrue sings “Don’t you see everything’s interweaving?” It’s a lyrical question that proffers a mystic assertion.

The album itself performs and exemplifies art as a work of recognition, the human task of perceiving oneself amid details, disasters, and blessings as a relentlessly relational phenomenon among others. In this, Horizons/East is the rare rock album (like Peter Gabriel’s So or Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On?) on which interrelatedness is a theme. As Kensrue explains, this isn’t an accident. “[Interrelatedness is] very important to the way I approach the world and the way I think about things. I really think that not attuning or attending to that interrelatedness is one of the bigger problems in the world. When you don’t see it, you miss the way that the good you do blossoms out and balloons out…the way that the evil you do does as well in the most banal ways.”

That way of conceiving the human situation picks up on a theme at work throughout Thrice’s catalogue, the imagery of sorting through contemporary wreckage, our own as well as the wreckage of others, as nomads, pilgrims, and seers within fallen and failing empires. They pick it up again with second track “Scavengers.”

Overhead, are those angels or vultures
Heavy wings and the hum of decay
They seethe and hover
Skew and smother the light of day

Over a a dark and intricate braiding of guitar and drum grooves, and delivered in a mournful, pleading gravel, these words bring us again to the question of discernment (angels or vultures) in regard to what serves coherence versus what disintegrates and destroys (“They’ve got you wearing a smile with a mask”). For Kensrue, the song’s landscape is and also kind of isn’t a thing of the past. Whether lost in a media diet that is essentially a disinformation pipeline or, relatedly, trapped in fear of a future of eternal conscious pain, Kensrue speaks of “toxic worldviews I once inhabited,” and in truth, “A lot of people that I love are still in that place.” These are bad ideas about ourselves and others that end up, in Kensrue’s words, “clouding the reality in front of them.” How do we engage one another in spite of our stuckness? Can a song get somewhere that an argument can’t.

Kensrue thinks so. “Yes, but it’s so out of your hand, which is good, but it involves a letting go.” This is where Thrice is informed by an ethic laid down by sci-fi novelist Ursula K. Le Guin. Kensrue quotes her fondly, reflecting his commitment to follow suit: “To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”

That skill, however, is not a call to settle for a posture of appeasement or apathy in regard to our relationship to people in the grip of wicked infrastructures and the terrors they abide. While the album communicates comfort with uncertainty, it’s uncertainty as the beginning of wonder. Not knowing something for certain can occasion a blossom, an opportunity, as opposed to a dead end.

This uncertainty is something the band seems to embrace with their entire career, and especially in their approach to this record, building out their own studio and recording completely on their own, unsure of what exactly they could extract from themselves this time around. Some of the writing even began with open ended challenges that the band laid on themselves like building a song using the quartal chords they found in much of the jazz they loved, or taking the Fibonacci sequence and turning it into a guitar riff. Both of those ideas actually ended up laying the foundation of the song “Northern Lights” that finds the four piece in a new sonic landscape. Thrice seems ever eager to step out into these spaces unknown to them, unsure of where their feet will land, and this new record is no exception.

In Horizons/East, the closed fist meets the open hand. This vision comes through in the art design of Jordan Butcher (who received a Grammy nomination for his work on Caspian’s On Circle). Evoking the imagery of the final scenes of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, it prepares the listener for strategy of engagement on offer in “Robot Soft Exorcism.”

The song opens with a strangely breathing yet robotic beat which deftly lures you into its rhythm despite the odd 7/8 time signature. With the beat leading you onward, dig if you will a picture of figure at a command console, looking through and within the eye socket of the head of a giant robot:

Looking down through armored glass
Above a field of fire and ash

Shouting and waving from the ground, a vulnerable individual tries to address the figure on high from below, calling their fellow human out

There’s another way to face the unforeseen
You don’t have to stay inside that machine
There’s a bigger game, and there’s a deeper dream

This call, according to Kensrue, is informed by the late scholar of culture, James Carse, who posited that the infinite play of the infinite game is a living alternative to the finite games of finite players who seek to defeat (or crush) the alleged opposition. In beautiful and unexpected ways Horizons/East takes up this task, the infinite play of the healing game, which Carse laid out. Like an open field, Thrice extends the invitation to better dreams, better behavior, and uncertainty as a guiding light.

By the time we reach “Unitive/East” (which contains a lovely lyrical nod to mewithoutYou), we’re treated to what feels like a cathedral made of piano music and echoes suspended over an abyss. You’ll want to start the transmission over to receive its witness more fully. In this, Horizons/East is like a soundtrack for deeper dreaming. A gift that keeps on giving.