Southern California shoegaze squad COLD GAWD return to Dais for their second and most supreme suite yet of crushing downer bliss: I’ll Drown On This Earth.
From the defiant scream that kicks off opening cut “Gorgeous,” the album rips in what singer and principal songwriter Matthew Wainwright describes as “go for it” mode – holding back nothing, wasting no time, all killer, no filler. Although the bulk of the songs were written in 2022, recording sessions weren’t booked until March of 2024, which allowed ample time to refine and distill the music’s hooks, heaviness, and haze. The result is a perfect storm of distortion and dreampop, cracked love songs cloaked in swooning walls of noise.
Recorded at Paradise Recorders in Anaheim, California with Colin Knight (of post-punk unit Object of Affection), Wainwright tracked the strings while Cameron Fonacier handled drums. The process was efficient and effective, sharpened by years of performance. Anthemic headbangers like “Portland,” “All My Life, My Heart Has Yearned For A Thing I Cannot Name,” and “Malibu Beach House” sound as dynamic as they do dialed in, soaked into the bones of the players. The lyrics came last, written by Wainwright a week before recording. Moods of surreality (“I can hear the blood in my fingers / nothing tunes out / the world’s too loud”), infatuation (“I will follow / everywhere you go / any way to feel / how you glow”), and melancholy (“God kept me around / for no good reason”) flicker and fade within a fog of memory and reverb.
As on 2022’s God Get Me The Fuck Out Of Here, COLD GAWD’s classic but contemporary vision of shoegaze manifests intriguingly in outlier moments, like the hushed, whirlpool reverie of “Tappan,” or the vaporous, slow-grind downtempo of “Nudism” (complete with regal piano outro). Theirs is a muse as vivid as it is varied, from “Loveless” to Drake to post-hardcore to Beach House. I’ll Drown evocatively captures the expanding canon of COLD GAWD, dense with riffs and raptures, escape and revelation, channeled from stacked amps and hidden powers: “Give praise / to whatever / I got time for / hallelujah.”