Horse Jumper of Love’s Creative Rebirth

Horse Jumper of Love’s fifth album, Disaster Trick, is a quiet reckoning. Its epiphanies aren’t eureka moments that hit you over the head, but ones that come through like a gas leak or a slow-acting poison. “A fresh addiction / Comes with the discipline / Hates the noise of sorrow / I read it in the Amazon Basics Bible / It’s nothing serious / But it’s not hard to tell / When you’re not doing well,” goes the unsettlingly acerbic second verse of “Today’s Iconoclast.” Like many of the tracks on the album, there’s an iciness—an air of stoicism in the face of pain and wonderment alike, making the narrator of each song come off as an outside observer watching their own life pass by.

Strangely enough, it’s also the most present the Boston-based slowcore group have ever sounded. “I feel like my whole theory and philosophy behind Horse Jumper is just to lift the veil of how we present ourselves to society. Sometimes you go onstage and it feels really like, cringe?” lead singer, guitarist and songwriter Dimitri Giannopoulos tells me. He’s laughing at himself as he says it, but continues to explain: “You go onstage and you’re singing in front of people and you might be fucking up. It just feels very raw. I want to show people exactly how I’m feeling and not be embarrassed.” On Disaster Trick, that rawness and emotional submersion manifests itself by letting us see the building blocks that comprise the walls that the speaker puts up. As listeners, we see the purpose behind the distance.

The use of self-deprecation and sarcasm as defense mechanisms against emotional vulnerability is longstanding in the slacker rock tradition that Horse Jumper of Love are a part of. Especially now that—to paint the culture of indie rock with an admittedly broad brush—we’ve become pretty earnestness-averse, since earnestness can so easily cross the line into the dirty word that Giannopoulos dares to invoke: cringe. There’s cultural currency in irony, but it’s only so long till the money runs out. Eventually, cringe is a risk that you have to take. I would not describe Disaster Trick as cringe, but I would describe it as taking gradual steps toward an earnestness that accepts cringe as a potential outcome and decides to gamble on it. To be cringe is to be human. Disaster Trick feels human.

Giannopoulos has been taking himself both more and less seriously on this album cycle—attempting to decrease his emotional distance from the songs without reducing their emotional weight. There’s more room to experiment with ideas and without having it feel like a waste if something ends up on the cutting room floor. When director Lance Bangs unexpectedly reached out to him on Instagram, Giannopoulos didn’t know what to expect. The two of them ended up working on the trippy, funhouse-mirror music video for “Snow Angel” and releasing it after scrapping their original video concept: “[Bangs] had this guy he knew build this huge box with a bunch of holes in it that I was gonna stand inside and he was gonna put a bunch of packing peanuts and a leaf blower inside of it,” Giannopoulos says. “We ended up not doing that at all.” Bangs also filmed a few Horse Jumper of Love live performances, and took the time to show Giannopoulos around Portland. “He picked me up from the airport, and we just hung out for a few days. He took me to some record shops and guitar stores. We went to Mississippi Records, which is a record store I really like.”

Today, Giannopoulos joins me on a call from “a Whole Foods somewhere outside of St. Paul, Minnesota.” He and his band are currently on tour supporting DIIV who, like Horse Jumper of Love, have been reaping the rewards of the post-lockdown shoegaze renaissance (though both were relatively early to it in comparison to other currently active shoegaze bands). “It’s coming back full circle,” says Giannopoulos. “When I was like 18, 19, that’s when I got really into my bloody valentine. And now, the younger kids are getting into DIIV and TAGABOW (They Are Gutting A Body of Water) and Blue Smiley and stuff like that, but I feel like the crowds have been pretty mixed-age. For us and Fully Body 2—who are also on this tour—we definitely have a younger audience.”

Giannopoulos admits that my bloody valentine’s Loveless—arguably shoegaze’s definitive album to this day—was one that he “didn’t get” when he first heard it. The way he describes getting into what would become one of the most influential records to his artistry, it sounds like he was giving himself homework: “I remember being 18 and almost like, forcing myself to listen to [Loveless] until it clicked. It was unlike anything that I had ever heard before. I grew up on 90s grunge and classic rock, so hearing something like that was mind-blowing.” On TikTok—a platform that’s boosted formerly niche bands like Duster into the pseudo-mainstream—shoegaze and slowcore have gained newfound mass appeal among younger audiences. The pandemic isn’t entirely to blame or thank, but it makes sense that the melancholic mumblings of shoegaze bands would resonate with a generation of listeners who spent a good chunk of their formative years shut-in at home, going to school online and interacting with their peers solely through screens. It’s indoor music for indoor kids, and I’m curious how it all translates once the bands and their audiences return to live music venues.

For Giannopoulos, there’s been a welcome shift in the way fans interact with artists whose music is more low-key in both tempo and mood. “There was almost a new appreciation for live music where people were able to be more present and patient with stuff that isn’t loud, fast rock music,” he says. “They’re more receptive to us doing a slow song.” He goes on to describe the understated aggression that feels unique to slowcore as a genre: “It’s almost punishing to the audience to play something so quiet that they have to stop talking.” I tell him that this tactic reminds me of being in school and having a teacher get fed up with the class and, instead of raising their voice, lowering it to a haunting, authoritative whisper. A shout commands attention for a moment, but sometimes the best way to let people know that you mean business is to get real quiet.

“I used to get so pissed about it when I was younger,” he laughs. “Like, ‘We played this really quiet song to a room of 200 drunk people and they were talking over it!’ But it makes sense.” Giannopoulos admits that the loud-and-quiet juxtaposition between the instrumentals and vocals on older Horse Jumper of Love songs was often a sort of defense mechanism. To combat the shyness and stage fright he experienced, he would “turn the guitar up really loud and sing really soft.” We’ve all heard the old adage about how in jazz songs, the notes that aren’t played are as important as the ones that are. Shoegaze strikes a similar balance. There’s a deliberateness to which lyrics are enunciated and which ones are obscured or drowned out by distortion.

One reason why Disaster Trick feels like a notable stylistic pivot from previous Horse Jumper of Love records is because of its directness—Giannopoulos’s lyrics are more straightforward, scene-driven and audible than they’ve ever been: the hushed suggestion “you could just keep me around” repeatedly coming up for air through waves of reverberating guitars on lead single “Wink”; the evocative and sparsely accompanied opening lines of “Heavy Metal” (“It’s heavy in my mouth / It’s cradled in your hands / You woke me up with water / You said I sleep like a liar”); on closer “Nude Descending” (named after a Marcel Duchamp painting), where Giannopoulos’ vocals are mixed more prominently than anywhere else on the record at the beginning of the track before gradually dissolving as he echoes “You know I can’t spend the night.”

“Going into writing [Disaster Trick] I was trying to be a little more direct than I have been before,” Giannopoulos says, referring to the lyrical content of the songs and the way he delivers it. “ I think that came with gaining confidence as a songwriter and performer. I used to go into recording with a lot of self-doubt and negativity.” For all the previous Horse Jumper of Love records, he’d finished writing and demoing pretty much all of the songs prior to setting foot in the recording studio. This time around, Giannopoulos and his band went into the recording process with “three or four complete songs,” leaving ample room for revision and development. He and his band made Disaster Trick at Drop of Sun studio in Asheville, North Carolina with one of today’s most in-demand producers in the indie sphere, Alex Farrar. “The stakes felt higher, but I was almost procrastinating more,” Giannopoulos explains, “I think that helped create something that worked in the end.” The way he describes the process, it was both freer and more urgent, more immediate.

Farrar and Drop of Sun have been largely credited with making Asheville the indie rock hub that it is today. Some of the artists known for their Farrar-produced records—MJ Lenderman, Karly Hartzman (Wednesday), Ella Williams (Squirrel Flower)—added guest features to Disaster Trick. Collaborations from the former two—both key players in the larger North Carolina scene and the shoegaze resurgence—came about when Giannopoulos was attending a barbecue with them in Asheville. As for Williams’s feature, Horse Jumper of Love had been playing early versions of songs like “Lip Reader” back in 2023 while they were on tour with Squirrel Flower: “I had just written it, and every night Ella would come up and sing the harmonies, so I thought it would just make sense to have her sing on that song. I’m really happy with the way it came out.”

Touring has offered a lot of opportunities for experimentation, and it has pushed Giannopoulos to alter his approach to making music. He considers the Disaster Trick album cycle to be “a creative reset,” and credits this largely to his newfound sobriety. “I would drink a lot before I played because I was nervous, and then fuck up, and then feel bad about it,” he admits. “It was a cycle that I had to break.” Making mistakes while intoxicated onstage only fueled his anxieties about continuing to make those mistakes, distracting him from the audience and the music itself. Since he quit drinking, Giannopoulos has felt less pressure to play a perfect show, and can simply be present in his performances: “When I’m sober onstage I feel truly connected to the song.”

There’s a clarity that was inaccessible before. When Giannopoulos is less in his head about eliciting the “right” reaction from the audience, there’s more room to connect with them in a genuine way and to trust that each song will do what it’s supposed to. More realistic expectations has meant increased gratification now that his inner-monologue is telling him he has to “win over everyone in this room and make them think I’m doing something profound.” “If I’m going on a support tour, if I’m lucky, like 10% of the people who have never heard our music will like it and want to listen to us,” Giannopoulos says.

Sobriety played a large role in the looseness of the recording process as well. Prioritizing a space to improvise both on tour and in the studio helped Giannopoulos to ease up on himself, to let go of any concrete expectations about the final product, and to embrace the directness and earnestness he’d previously shied away from. He trusted that his bandmates—John Margaris and Jamie Vadala-Doran—and collaborators would help me make something that they could all be proud of, and he trusted that the audiences, both preexisting and future, would find something in it to resonate with. Disaster Trick feels uniquely lived-in, Giannopoulos inhabits the record in a way he couldn’t before. “There are people who want to listen, who want to buy the records, who want to see us live,” he affirms. “So I owe it to these people to take myself seriously and go into [the recording process] believing that I’m a good songwriter, or at least believing that people are going to want to hear what I have to say. I wasn’t trying to hide.”

Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn, New York, currently based in Wilmington, North Carolina. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Her work has appeared in The Alternative, Merry-Go-Round Magazine, Post-Trash, Swim Into The Sound and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.