I've always wondered the what the soundtrack to the apocalypse would really sound like. An obvious, albeit lame answer would probably be R.E.M.'s "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)," but to me, that's never captured the urgency and futility associated with an event of that level. To me, it needs to be something gargantuan and antagonistic, yet wistful and begrudgingly subservient; something akin to a symphony of deteriorating concrete, where heavily distorted guitars crash incessantly against a wall of noise, with the only saving grace being the ineffectual mumbling of our internal monologue grappling with our impending doom. Imagine my surprise when I came to find out that Glixen had been tracking that exact feeling all this time.
Glixen's brand new single, "Sick Silent," is an ethereal, blistering mess of fuzz and distortion, reminiscent of the early shoegaze pioneers; rebuilt atop the foundations laid by Sonic Youth and glued together by the horned-up bravado of a Deftones B-side. Similar to their predecessors, Glixen's latest track coos and pines for a reprieve from their formulaic emotional torment, "every day sticked down to dream, everything seems to move in circles," lead vocalist Aislinn Ritchie whispers in anguish. She's sick of staying silent, a change is necessary, but what is there to be done in the wake of constant grief? "I guess I’ll let yo u take me, sometimes it doesn’t stay true."
Produced and engineered by Sonny Diperri (My Bloody Valentine, Portugal. The Man, Lord Huron), the single perfectly accentuates Ritchie's mellow, soothing vocal style, allowing her voice to ebb and flow with the harsh noise guitar clawing through the listeners headphones, as if she were an echoed cry into the abyss, still ricocheting off the walls of a seemingly endless catacomb. Adjacent to the mic, lead guitarist Esteban Santana and bassist Sonia Garcia take charge in sculpting the soundscape of "Sick Silent," building off one another to coalesce into a hazy amalgamation of preternatural instrumental garbling, tempoed precisely and emphatically by drummer Keire Johnson, brewing a seemingly haphazard vision of the band playing amidst the carnage and terror of an active tornado.
Glixen are worthy bearers of the torch passed unto them by the shoegaze revivalists of the 2010's, already squirreling themselves into the same breathe as heavy hitters like Superheaven and Basement. They stand poised to carve their own names into the sky, with a frightening, gritty intensity that pushes the genre forward and their exploding fanbase to the brink of insanity. They are a true destructive force with the might and wherewithal to carry the sound to unforeseen heights, leaving a trail of flames and embers in their apocalyptic wake.
Rob Lucchesi
Glixen
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