Glitterer On Tour With New Bloom Fest

‘The thing that I care about above everything is playing and to have the opportunity to play music.’

Ned Russin, the founder of postpunk American band Glitterer is currently in Peru, South America with a jaunt to Australia to follow as part of New Bloom Festival, with a couple of sideshows with Balance And Composure thrown in.

‘I think people are just excited here. For instance, we played Guatemala for the first time. I mean all these places we were playing for the first time, but Guatemala is a country that I’ve never been to before, and they were telling us how the people who are booking shows are in the first generation of punks in Guatemala. There are places where everything is relatively new so bands coming, even now, it’s still an exciting thing. People are excited about live music, about bands and it shows.’

From South America then onto Australia, also a debut jaunt for the band, is part of surreal dream for a man who created the band on his own during the hazy days of the pandemic.

‘It’s something that honestly, I didn’t even know if it would be possible for us, and then it just kind of came together really quickly and it’s something that we’re all excited for. I think the shows are going to be really cool. Australia is probably the farthest away we could get from where we live. It seems like it’s a difficult thing to pull off, then everything came together so quickly and easily. Now it’s just a reality and yeah, it’s coming right up. It’s going to be a good tour and everybody’s excited for it.’

‘The fact that anybody has ever listened to anything that I’ve made is kind of mind blowing to me. I am fortunate enough to have an older brother, he’s seven years older than me, and he got into punk when he was a teenager, so I was exposed to it at a very young age. His being in a band made it seem very possible for my brother, myself and our friends that we could do bands. This guy that we know, he’s playing in bands, he’s doing all this stuff, but at the same time, it still felt so small. Now we’re going a little bit further and a little bit further, and it always felt connected to this original thing that we understood in a weird way, going across oceans into different continents, into different hemispheres, all these things I never even conceived of that as a young person playing music. I never thought that we would be going anywhere else besides New Jersey. It’s kind of hard to wrap my head around at times.’

Current album Rationale was the projects third however first with other members playing and contributing to the songs. For a seasoned talent like Ned, it wasn’t the boundary issue you may think.

‘It was very easy to give up control for me. I’d never really conceived of the band as a solo project. I always said it was a band with one member. I do think part of it, at the beginning, I wanted to prove to myself that I could write a song on my own, but then coming into it, the thing that I like the most about playing music is playing with other people, working towards a singular goal as a unit. That’s the most rewarding thing about it in terms of the creative aspect of it.’

Rationale itself is a sublime emotive piece of modern punk. Twelve songs across twenty one minutes, while the music may not be traditional DIY anarchy punk, its DNA pores throughout the album.

‘The beginning of the band, I was very conscious of the length of the songs, maybe part of it was honestly a little bit of insecurity because this is all me. I don’t think anybody’s going to want to listen to it for more than a minute. Obviously, there’s aesthetic choices going on as well and references to other bands with short songs. Then as time went on and the band kept going and evolved, we kept writing songs and it would feel like they would hit their natural stride. They would get to all the parts that we needed them to get to and everybody would sign off. This is a complete idea. Then we would record it to see what it was looking like, and it would be a minute and fifteen seconds! This is just the natural length of the songs. We weren’t saying we have to trim these other parts. We have to get rid of all this excess stuff. It was just the songs that we were writing ended up being short.’

‘A lot of it has to do with coming from punk hardcore. That’s the subconscious part of it that I was maybe not completely aware of at the beginning as I learned to write songs. There’s this economy to the songs that you don’t really need to do much more. While Glitterer maybe doesn’t really sit in with those bands perfectly in a musical sense, I think ideologically in a lot of other ways, we’re very much informed by all those bands that I grew up listening to and still listen to. But yeah, it’s like it was just a simple way to think about writing songs.’

So how does one describe Glitterer if not punk, yet not also shoe gaze?

‘We are just a band who plays melodic music and we play it aggressively live, try to play as loud as we can. We play songs with, it sounds corny to say, but we mean it with feeling. We’re always just going into it trying to play to the best of our ability and the way that I approach music. I really care about it and I’m really moved by it and I can’t help but express that when we play live.’

Interview By Iain McCallum

Catch Glitterer at New Bloom Fest on the following dates, tickets from Destroy All Lines…

Also on tour with Balance And Composure on the following dates, tickets from Destroy All Lines…