Maybe the best descriptor for glass beach at this stage in their career arch is simply post-. Post-emo is where the Los Angeles four-piece started while cementing the scene’s “fifth wave” with their Internet-born debut, the first glass beach album, but in a throwback to a much more adventurous time in music when artists would give themselves room to breathe and create, their sophomore follow-up, plastic death, arrives fives year later in a much different form. This may as well be a different era from today’s content-overloaded, attention-deficit music world, and glass beach are all too aware of that, as to their fascination, the band has evolving beyond any boundary of a timeline. Consider it the OK Computer of the fifth wave, with frontperson and multi-instrumentalist J McClendon, lead guitarist Layne Smith, bassist Jonas Newhouse, and drummer William White redesigning their sound by way of tangents from a past alternative era with that of intensely polymathic future-minded experimentation which hears their guitar rock ocean absorbing matter from prog rock, black metal, free jazz, and ambient electronic waves. No wonder they’ve likened it to the Pacific garbage patch, having collected influence from modern art, culture, and existentialism (especially that if our virtual selves) into something beyond logic that somehow makes sense in a philosophical way mirroring McClendon’s queer-coded narratives. Deep in reflection and rich in color in spite of the dark floors its immersed within, plastic death is a hyper-conscious display of the personal that churns the physical and spiritual planes reaching for eternal life in a world that seemingly uncovers new ways to destroy us by the day.

Highlights: “slip under the door”, “whalefall”, “abyss angel”

glass beach’s plastic death is available now on Run for Cover Records.

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