Exclusive album premiere of ‘Glass Narcissus’ by Giant Day, slated for release through The Elephant 6 Recording Company on August 23, 2024.

Giant Day is the latest sonic adventure from multi-instrumentalist Derek Almstead and vocalist Emily Growden, blending their deep-rooted pop and psychedelic influences honed over years in the dynamic Athens, Georgia music scene. Their sound is a unique fusion—rich, infectious, danceable, and tinged with darkness—offering a modern twist on timeless musical styles.

Almstead, renowned for his work with indie icons like Circulatory System, The Olivia Tremor Control, The Glands, Elf Power, and of Montreal, has long been a pillar of the legendary Elephant 6 Collective. His talents as a songwriter, producer, and recording engineer have earned him widespread respect. Growden, known for her work with Marshmallow Coast, Faster Circuits, and The New Sound of Numbers, brings her vocal expertise, honed at the University of Georgia, to the forefront of this project, having contributed her voice to numerous indie recordings and performances.

Now based in rural Pennsylvania, the duo is channeling their energy into crafting new music, renovating a historic farm, and building a state-of-the-art recording studio. Giant Day’s debut album, ‘Glass Narcissus,’ will be released by The Elephant 6 Recording Company on August 23, 2024.

Album Track by Track by Derek Almstead and Emily Growden

‘I Can Take It’
I wrote this song very early on in pandemic lockdown and we had lots of reasons to try to find escapes from the anxiety of that moment. I’d had Janet Jackson’s ‘When I think of You’ looping in my head on and off for a couple of years. I’ve loved it since I was a kid and had thought about covering it for fun. This is a tribute to that song, in an impressionistic way. I had a basement studio in Athens, Georgia where everything was set up, mic’ed and ready to record. I’d spend the bulk of the day down there writing and recording and then share what I’d worked on with Emily. It’s a love song; a love song to a partner I love and a muse who is excited about my ideas, but it’s also a love song to the refuge of making music.

I planned on adding a “sounds of a party” track (laughing, clinking glasses, etc.) at the beginning but I realized it was incongruous now that the parties were gone. That clip-clop percussion in the verse was my interpretation of one of Will Hart’s ideas… When I was pretty much finished with the mixes, I’d send them to him for “last looks” feedback, and on this one he suggested some random organic-sounding percussion. There’s a super sped-up glockenspiel part that comes in right before the exploding laser-light-show of a synth-heavy bridge. The bass was one of the last things I added. Most of the instrumentation is really taught and robotic but that bass comes in swinging in an over-the-top way. That’s a fully improvised first or maybe second take. I knew as soon as I added the bass that this would have to be the album opener; it encapsulated the feeling of the surprising side of the joy of creating music and has the feeling of a mission statement.

‘Ignore the Flood’
In late 2018 I wrote a song a day every day for a month and this is one of them, but the lyrics and final version didn’t catalyze until the pandemic. Thematically, it’s about man-made catastrophes, through a sort of Biblical metaphor. Emily is a bit obsessed with the story of the Johnstown Flood which happened in Pennsylvania in 1889… essentially it’s a story about ignoring serious problems and kicking the can until the inevitable crisis hits and it’s too late. I was stricken by the television mini-series “Chernobyl”, and it has a similar thread. It’s also about solving these problems- rebuilding and learning from those kinds of failures.

The opening sizzling noise was just a happy accident. I had gotten a new keyboard module and was auditioning sounds. It was extra loud compared to what I had been using, so it was getting submerged in compression, but also had a ground loop that would swell up as the chord faded away. It makes me think of a downed power line or some other chaotic electrical energy and it fit right in with the theme.

Will’s feedback on this one was to go right to a chorus in the beginning, so I edited in a little teaser chorus before the first verse. I was going for a combination of Pylon/The Smiths/Prince scratchy/surfy guitar on this one combined with some Echoplex touches. I’m suspicious that we’re ripping something off with that bass line but we can’t place it.

‘Vacation’
This is another one that gestated from that late 2018 writing session; four guitar hooks, the bass line and a drum pattern. I couldn’t crack the lyrics and shelved it. Last year I had an argument with an old friend from whom I’d become estranged, essentially because they are stuck in loops of victimhood and grievances that haven’t changed in 20+ years. The lyrics spilled out in frustration. As I sat with it, I realized I can be that way as well. It’s become a warning to myself about using anger as a way of defining my past and as a way of defending my ego.

The opening bass is actually piano and Rhodes doubled, but it segues to the main pattern which was the original line. If it had stayed like the demo it could have been repeated throughout the whole tune, but I wanted some tension in the choruses, and rewrote it to create that. I was shy about the straightforwardness of these lyrics, but Jeff and Will pushed me to turn them up. I was listening to the King Krule album when I recorded guitars and I think it seeped in a little bit. This drum part was born out of finally learning all the rudiments a few years ago, so it it has a lot of marching elements; it’s part of the synchronicity with the militant tone of the song. Will had the idea for me to add a marching snare a la Pretty Things’ “SF Sorrow”, which appears in the 3rd verse.

‘Walk With A Shadow’
This is another loop-based musical idea from that 2018 writing session. The lyrics were written in May 2020, during the beginning of the pandemic. We were living in Athens, just months before we relocated to Pennsylvania, under complete lockdown and starting to unravel. I was obsessing about physical and financial insecurity and stuck deep in my own head. I was also settling into the most normalized schedule I’d had in my adult life… Waking up every morning at 6:30am and going on a run, then working out in the yard of our rental house, clearing this overgrown brush area until it got too hot, all while listening to hours and hours of podcast interviews. I felt like I was sitting in on strangers’ psychotherapy sessions and imprinting all these anxieties on top of my own. I realized that I’d been living with a kind of functional depression for a long time and that this shadow had long been a part of my attitude towards the world.

I turned a cheap old Lotus bass I had into a fretless and played it with a pick with a chorus effect on it… a little nod to “Sledgehammer”- another one of my formative 1982-1986 Top 40 loves. I had electronic drums on this forever, but thought it was little too breathlessly machine-like and replaced them with this very simple pattern. Our friend from Athens -now NYC- Jeff Tobias (of Sunwatchers and Modern Nature) overdubbed his elegantly designed bass clarinet line that keeps layering as the song comes to a close with his triumphant trombone blast.

‘Overtone’
I had this drum groove I was working with in 2005 that my friend Josh McKay (of Macha and Deerhunter) recorded vibes on, but I never got around to finishing it. Carlton Owens (Faster Circuits, Cracker) had done drums- it was intended to be a part of the M Coast album “Say It In Slang” we did together. As Emily and I were working on developing songs for “Glass Narcissus” I found it on an old data drive but the files were corrupted. I was able to save the vibes and the drone-y harmonic guitar that comes in at the end via editing, but I had to rebuild everything else- drums, bass, guitars.

The main thing that was missing- the lyrics and the vocal melody- came out in 15 minutes. I’m sure lots of people write this way, but I usually have the most luck coming up with things I like by just improvising a vocal over the tune and interpreting and revising the weird words that come out of my mouth. I think at this moment I had just seen “The Elephant 6 Recording Company” documentary again… having moved so far away from all our friends from 25 years of living in Athens, GA, feeling really insular… I was missing the more social version of myself. I think it came out as mantra to be a little more open to people again after being so closed off. I used overtones as the metaphor- it’s an optimistic song about the happy accidents that come about in the creative process from mistakes- about letting go of controlling things (something which is difficult for me) in my non-musical life as well.

The opening tape sped-up drums and prepared piano psychedelic wipe is sort of a in-joke to myself of a “dream-sequence” moment in old tv shows. I love the Robyn song ‘Ever Again’ and wanted to write song that felt world-weary but super-positive and upbeat like that. Will called for handclaps on the chorus.

‘Suspended Animation’
This song is definitely from that 2018 writing session- at least as far as the bass, guitar and drum patterns are concerned.

For a little context: I had just bought a Fender Telecaster and a Fender Twin and was doing a lot of angular/rockabilly/surfy/reverb-y stuff upstairs away from the studio to get out of my usual routine. I had a a cheap electronic drum pad, my P-bass (on one of those stands where you mount it to a mic stand and can just walk up and play it, like Stanley Jordan used to use) and my guitar all running through an 80’s Ibanez rack delay into a basic looper pedal. So I’d get a pattern going on e-drums, add a simple bass line and then play guitar over it until I got three or four parts, and then recorded it onto my iPhone for later development. It was a really easy way to flow out song ideas. I had a rhythm going and did one a day for the entire month of December.

The melody and lyrics finally came about in 2021 as a sort of tongue-in-cheek response to the cartoonish, religious cult of self-advancement that seems so prevalent- like the voice of someone trapped inside it and seeing it clearly. Emily pushed this one to the next level by singing an octave up from where I had demo’ed it and made it feel very thrillingly Kate Bush-like. Bass is doubled with upright and synth here, like a modern-day wall-of-sound Phil Spector bass. The drums are some of the only E-drums that made it on to record, from my TR808 clone, but the hi-hat cymbal pattern is actually a gong played with brushes. There’s a huge amount of differences between this and the single version we released a year ago- new vocals, bass, keys, delay loops, percussion, guitar and an extended middle break.

‘Fair Dues’
This song was- once again- generated in that 2018 loop-writing session, but it was very different then; much more Neu-ish in the original form. I ended up pushing it towards a more sparse/desert-like space when I finally got around to messing with it in 2023. It’s almost like a country/western guitar part but with this little drone-y twist. This one has gone through lots of changes to get where it landed.

Lyrically it’s like a conversation between a stoic and a capitalist. A little influenced by one of my favorite songwriters, The Lily’s Kurt Heasley. He has a song called ‘Leo Ryan (Our Pharoah’s Slave)’ from the amazing album ‘The 3 Way,’ but ‘Fair Dues’ doesn’t share much more than the pharoah theme. The title is a little reference to the British slang that I only really know from ‘The Mighty Boosh,’ which means something like, “that’s only fair”, but which is also a bit of a conversation stopper.

Our good friend Heather McIntosh sent us these soaring cello parts that appear in the intro and the refrain. Will had the idea for the blurry delayed glockenspiel outline parts in the chorus.

‘We Were Friends’
Yet another 2018 looper-demo, and as I listened back to this one I absolutely hear the Cleaners From Venus influence, which maybe isn’t so apparent in the final song.
The lyrics were conceived during the protests and subsequent crackdowns in the summer of 2020, during lockdown, where everyone was so hyper-polarized. This is another one where I just started improvising singing lyrics to get ideas. I was singing The Kinks’ “Do You Remember Walter” to myself and I recalled my childhood friend in Oklahoma named Walter who I hadn’t thought of in a long time. It’s an assumption that he would be on the other side of the polarity; I have no way of knowing. This version of him is just a caricature, other than a few basic details, such as that he was the Methodist preacher’s son and we were in Show Choir together. After I wrote this, my mom reminded me that we almost burned our house down playing with GI Joes and lighting them on fire after school. I ran over to the neighbors’ house and grabbed a garden hose to put it out. I was a latchkey kid and it was not fun to explain the charred front wall of the house to my parents when they got home from work.

The swirling electric guitar in the intro and the little Echoplex guitar stabs are meant to evoke a dreamlike memory-state. Will gave a note to add tambourine on the last chorus to take the energy up a notch.

‘Patience’
This song came out of a 2018 looper-demo on which I had Emily improvise vocals. I had the rhythm loop going and played guitar while she sang melodies though the reverb channel on my twin. When I started organizing it in the studio in late 2022 I used those melodies as a starting point. The lyrics start out as a kind of meditation with some Rumi ideas and poetic concepts about the paradoxes of beauty and ugliness, comfort and danger in the world, and how these ideas can flatten out with the perspective of time. Eventually this all ends up like a joke that feels paralyzing; to have the idea of an infinite perspective without the ability to have infinite time to live through these moments. To be getting older and still have a shyness about making art, which I feel is my calling, and the simultaneous meaninglessness and joy of it. Our farmhouse is in an area of a valley called the Village of Patience, and living in a place this quiet and removed where the rotation of the seasons and of nature and the passing of time are all felt so very acutely… the title seemed appropriate.

Everything in this mix morphs throughout the song. The upright bass disappears into layers of synth bass, and the brush drums push and pull into and out of an electronic drum pulse. There’s an ensemble of shaker tracks that move around in the stereo space. The Rhodes and guitar keep evolving slowly upward in both pitch and density. I asked our friend David McDonnell (Bablicon, Michael Columbia) to try a saxophone part and possibly run some midi stuff I’d generated through his modular synth rig. What he sent me back was more than I could have hoped for, and I ended up pulling out a lot of the stuff in order to make room for his additions- bubbling organ pads from his Kurzeil synth engine and his incredible saxophone solos. Emily added the delicate synth tone cluster arpeggiations. I played the mix for my friend Jamey Robinson (Buffalo Stance, Need New Body, Man Man) and realized -as we were listening- that the narrative power of Dave’s sax was competing with the vocal for attention instead of supporting it. I got Jamey to filter the saxophone line through my mono synth as a reactive improv, and we ended up with this close but just-on-the-other-side-of-the-glass sound.

‘Reflections on Kettle Black’
Because of the increasing density of the song ‘Patience,’ I ended up with too many parts to use without the mix being washed out. I moved the ambient beds I’d made with some midi instruments and the modular synth stuff that Dave McDonnell had given me, and let them continue over the arpeggiated synth pulse Emily created. I added a bass guitar through a watery/surf guitar tremolo for a faux baritone guitar melody.

Our new studio has a small trout pond right behind it which reflects watery light onto the kettle black ceiling all winter just before sunset; the time of day I’m usually winding down my workday before going up to the farmhouse to make dinner. It feels like a very natural endpoint.

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