The sound of What Is Success, Open Head’s second album and debut for Wharf Cat Records (out Jan 24), started with an argument in the practice space. The members of the heaviest band in Kingston, NY, and perhaps the entire world, were tired of their instruments. The post-punk they’d been playing together for the previous five years or so was beginning to feel like a sort of prison—the opposite of the freedom they initially got together to pursue.
“Nothing sounded good,” remembers Jared Ashdown, one of the band’s two guitarist-vocalists. “It was, ‘I hate my guitar,’ ‘I hate my bass,’ Alright, then let’s stop playing them.”
Something clicked. Bassist Jonathan McCarthy gravitated toward synthesizer, playing low notes like idling hovercraft. Ashdown picked up a sampler loaded with industrial field recordings made by drummer Daniel Scwhartz, running them through a bevy of effects pedals and using them as uncanny percussion instruments. Schwartz himself began incorporating rhythms drawn from Open Head’s mutual love of left-field electronic dance music. Rather than actually putting down their guitars, Brandon Minnervini and Ashdown delved further into their ongoing exploration of extended techniques, turning their instruments into celestial chimes or electric motors, sometimes vast and textural and other times pinprick-precise.
This new approach has paid dividends for Open Head, who have been attracting more and more attention of late. Recent underground favorites, who have shared stages with bands like, Geese, Dummy, Show Me The Body, Cola, and Water From Your Eyes over the past couple of years, the band’s newest material has come in for critical praise as well, with early singles “Catacomb” and “House” attracting attention from Pitchfork, Stereogum, Consequence, BrooklynVegan and Post-Trash who described “House” as “a pummeling, ruinous single that draws deep from the well of NYC avant-garde.”
Today, the band are back with a new preview of their LP, a track called “N.Y. Frills” that is premiering with FLOOD.
Open Head say of the track:
In a sort of homage to New York No-Wave, N.Y. Frills is an encounter with the monotone Goliath that is Manhattan. Our guitarist Brandon Minnervini sings the song, and together with bassist Jon McCarthy he wrote it while working for a fabrication business in Kingston, sanding designer aluminum shelving. Every so often, Brandon would be tasked with delivering the products to ultra-wealthy patrons in New York City.
A drive that started at a dusty Kingston warehouse would end in the alien opulence of a Manhattan penthouse, or a private AI sports betting clubs, or a ‘development workshop’ full of untouched fabrication machines occupying prime manhattan real-estate, and then back again. Brandon brushed up against the type of wealth most never see. The song is a meditation on contact with those who live with such extravagance, and their detachment from those who make it possible on physical and material level. From a similar perspective the song describes Open Head’s relationship with New York City in general–one of both proximity and distance, where the city is always within reach, yet the band is always a visitor, an outsider to its tempo, its density and its size.
Lyrically, the song is the return journey from a brush with the extravagant. It begins in the high-rise, amidst the luxury class, and with each verse drops “lower still,” until the narrator sinks to become the ground itself—no different than the physical earth that supports the weight of the city. “Heaven’s gate, sink and wait, object love, interest rates.”
LISTEN TO OPEN HEAD’S “N.Y. FRILLS”
Keep your mind open.
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[Thanks to Tom at Terrorbird Media.]
