SUPERDESTROYER is an anonymous artist mentioned in our 32 DIY COVID-era Discoveries in Alt Punk feature, and in many ways this makes sense its mainbrain remains unnamed. Each new project from the Columbus, Ohio, artist represents a reinvention–the formation of a new identity. Last year’s Things Are Made of Things and Those Things Are Made of More Things and Such Joy channeled chiptune and spacey electro-punk, respectively, into fluid and hard-hitting rock music. Earlier this year he dropped In Your Loneliness Your Holiness, a psychedelic amalgamation of downtempo and pop punk, and now he’s made something new again.
Goon, Superdestroyer’s new album, which we’re stoked to give you in its entirety below, is a self-proclaimed “beach gaze” release and its author has got a point. The riffs in “Beach Curse//Reality Bends Around Me” are surfy, the smooth beats that make up “Blood Blooms” are sunny and breezy, and songs like “We Don’t Have the Benefits of Time Travel” swirl and interlock in ways that recall shoegaze’s muted tones.
Goon will be available on October 14th.
For fans of: Hey, ily, Spirit of the Beehive, Sleigh Bells, Crying, Lobster Fight, Brave Little Abacus. Bio by Zac Djamoos
Superdestroyer draws on the strengths of a number of other post-genre musicians, such as Analogue Heart, Oldphone, Father of the Year, Caleb Haynes (Hey, ily), and Blake Turner (New You), which contribute to the dynamic nature of the record.
Lonely Ghost Records, which Superdestroyer co-founded with his life long friend Shane (Father of the Year), has a philosophy that rigid genre boxes are outdated in 2022. The label recently put out genre-defying opuses like Hey ily’s Psychokinetic Love Songs, Cheem’s Guilty Pleasure, and exciting!!excellent!!’s tysm!!!!!!, and Goon fits perfectly into that lineage.
“Goon tells the story of a doomed family vacation to the beach.” – comments Superdestroyer.
“It’s meant to capture the implosion of the family unit and the ways in which familial relationships shape and affect us as people.”
Continues Superdestroyer: “Sonically, I wanted the album to sound like sitting on a cosmic beach at night while reality crumbles around you–I wanted it to be surreal. So, I tried to approach the album with more of a “rock” angle to it and then find ways to make it sound less familiar. Often I took inspiration from the movement of water: like, Sinking has a more straight-forward post-grunge sound but then there’s that synth sloshing around underneath that makes it sound like violent waves on the surface of the calm deep; Time Travel’s lead synths mimick waves lapping against rocks; and IWDRHOTB invokes waves rolling into shore at night.”
“I tried to incorporate things like that in all of the songs and to make it spacey and textural. I also really enjoyed collaborating with people on this album. Daniel Zasadny Co-Produced this album, by helping shaping a cohesive tone throughout the mixes and Kris Crummet did an amazing job mastering. I also got to work with some super talented people making really great music and it’s been exciting to see all of it come together.”
We asked Superdestroyer to share his thoughts on selected singles off of the release and here’s what we’ve got.
Death Mask (feat. Father of the Year & Oldphone):
This song explores manipulative relationships and the ways in which they take hold within our own psyche to affect one’s self-concept and confidence. I started it in 2019 and it’s been swimming around in my head ever since. Initially it was going to be an instrumental for Father of the Year, but he didn’t think it fit what we were working on, so I asked if I could have it. It’s built on a synth loop he brought over. I compressed drums against the synth line so that the drums triggered different parts of the riff and I turned that into the foundation of the song. I’ve tinkered with it a lot over the years and always felt like it didn’t quite work. I decided to ask Gregory (Oldphone) to see what they could do on guitar and they sent me the textural guitar and the riffs that ended up on the song. As soon as I heard what they did I knew that was it.
FKA Still Chill (feat. Blake Turner & Analogue Heart):
FKA was written to sound like how it feels to be bursting with anxiety while trying to play things off like everything is cool. It starts out heavy, capturing that feeling of wanting to rip your own skin off to escape dealing with all of the stress in your life, before it transitions into something more melodic and breezy. This was meant to mimick that feeling of forced composure where you try to appear as if everything is fine on the surface. Blake’s feature really helped convey the calm energy I was aiming for, and I think it helps to have a totally different person and voice in that part of the song because it mirrors the way we can act like a totally different person from how we feel. However the song eventually becomes more aggressive before devolving into a full blown breakdown, because ultimately those feeling of being extremely anxious and frustrated alwaya re-emerge. The Analogue Heart vocals at the end really end the song with a punch and help convey the narrator’s frustration.
