Long Island post-hardcore influencers GLASSJAW have revealed the full stream of their new full-length Material Control, their first new album in 15 years! Use the Spotify or Apple Music player below to hear the whole thing and leave your thoughts below!
Material Control is out today on Century Media! The band are playing a small release show at Brooklyn’s Saint Vitus venue tonight. Expect some live videos soon!
The label commented:
Speculation grew when a mysterious pre-order of the album was briefly visible online and then suddenly gone. Word of the pre-order quickly spread across Reddit, Twitter and various music blogs and websites. Fans began to cautiously believe that, indeed, a third album would drop soon. GLASSJAW, notoriously tight-lipped, fueled more speculation when fans across the globe began to randomly receive mysterious postal service packages from the band. The packages included thousands of postcards sent to express the band’s gratitude to the dedicated fanbase who have waited patiently for new music for over a decade (since GLASSJAW’s last critically acclaimed full-length release “Worship and Tribute”).These ‘thank you’ postcards double as playable vinyl of each new track from “Material Control”.
Material Control is a massive work, far heavier than anything in Glassjaw’s catalog. That is due, in large part, to having produced the album themselves — “the record finally sounds like the band we heard in our heads” — and pushing its distorted, rumbling bass to the foreground. In addition to playing bass and writing the drum parts, Justin Beck’s guitar work, in particular, has evolved into something more textural. It also doesn’t hurt that The Dillinger Escape Plan’s Billy Rymer absolutely destroys those drums. / NPR – GO HERE to see the full track-by-track feature!
For Material Control, the GJ braintrust of vocalist Daryl Palumbo and guitarist/bassist Justin Beck enlisted Dillinger Escape Plan drummer Billy Rymer to record the most furious addition to their canon. Rymer ably powers the duo to bring a sophisticated (but hardly less dense) menace to the proceedings, one that’s constantly shifting. Palumbo’s vocals are in top form, whether he’s delivering full exhortation (“Pompeii”) or being a sweet soul angel over fractured desperado blues (“Strange Hours”). Beck shores his partner up with charging riffs and corrosive harmonic noise that gives the proceedings a hyper-contemporary awareness. (“Hyper-contemporary” defined as an awareness that a building could fall on you when you’re walking down the street and not giving some “hot new producer” points on your album.) Material Control is a rare document of a band not interested in revisiting its past, but still succeeding in remaining vibrant, alluring and (at a few junctures) caustic. / AltPress – GO HERE to read the full interview with the band!
On first listen, it sounds very much like vintage Glassjaw, with frontman Daryl Palumbo’s emotive howl floating above the band’s furious pummel-churn. / Stereogum
It’s hard to call a post-hardcore album unexpected in a year that has already seen the first At the Drive In album in 17 years and the first Quicksand album in 22 years, but I really wasn’t sure if we’d ever get Glassjaw’s third album. They put out the Coloring Book EP in 2011 and a few non-album singles before that, but a full-length followup to 2002’s classic Worship & Tribute started to feel like a myth. They had been talking about it for about a decade, and the lineup changes they kept going through didn’t make it seem any more likely. But lo and behold, there’s just a month left of 2017 and Glassjaw have finally dropped the album. And it’s really good. / BrooklynVegan
Glassjaw has always been as much a band as an immersive art project. For most of their career, which started in 1993, the group’s output has consisted of only two-full length albums (2000’s Everything You Wanted To Know About Silence and 2002’s Worship And Tribute), yet the mythology surrounding the Long Island-based post-hardcore act has thrived due to their small but legendary catalog, sporadic EP releases, and energetic live shows. For Material Control, the band’s unexpected yet highly anticipated third-full length, Palumbo and Beck wrote the material on their own and then enlisted The Dillinger Escape Plan drummer Billy Rymer as well as a few special guests to make the duo’s artistic vision a reality. / Noisey – GO HERE to read another fresh interview with GLASSJAW, released earlier this week
Glassjaw are fully cognisant that they can’t satisfy everyone’s tastebuds. But, even so, they would still find a way to pack a wallop of pizazz for every listener. And that’s what makes “Material Control” such an articulate composition. The detrimental and abrasive attitude still remains in a somewhat experimental persona, but it helps give the LP a character of its own, feeling much like an original Glassjaw product. To keep a signature sound and identity stay in its place throughout a record is one of the key components that makes an album good. And after all these years, Glassjaw have managed to keep abreast of maintaining a sonic fingerprint in each album’s locale, high and low. No matter how far apart they are between albums, “Material Control” is further evidence of Glassjaw’s strenuous musicianship. / Overdrive-Mag.com
