“I tried the quiet thing on the last album and I realized there’s definitely two parts of me: I like really heavy music, and I like really gentle music,” says Horse Jumper of Love vocalist Dimitri Giannopoulos in casting some context over the Boston underground rock band’s latest and arguably best album to date, Disaster Trick. Citing Leonard Cohen’s Songs From a Room and Hum’s Downward is Heavenward as influential touchpoints from where the trio went here, I’d go one step further in saying that accidentally arriving right on time five albums into their careers with where indie rock’s current interest in slowcore and shoegaze resides right now makes their sound an ideal culmination of both worlds which Giannopoulos brink aspiration to when he stated the above.

Patience remains a virtue in taking in a HJoL listening experience regardless. The music swashes slowly in thick density foam around brain matter, out of body, and the outside world. In being fortified with heavier textures filling in the past’s hollow center through distressed electric feedback alongside drummer James Aloyseus-Charles Doran and bassist John Theodore Margaris (alongside guest contributions from Squirrel Flower, MJ Lenderman and Karly Hartzman of Wednesday) directly plotting out Giannopoulos’ steps with more sobered, visible outlines in their footpaths, the listen simultaneously reels the band’s creative method back to basics while turning the energy conserved from intentional restraint into something looser that piles over you like a fuzzy weighted blanket.

Framing Disaster Trick in this moment, Horse Jumper of Love pull off what any guitar-based indie rock album decades on from the point at which innovation has more or less ceased elsewhere does in merging contemporary timelines with the present state of wherever your headspace is now in surprising new forms.

Highlights: “Snow Angel”, “Today’s Iconoclast”, “Gates of Heaven”

Horse Jumper of Love’s Disaster Trick is available now on Run for Cover Records.

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