Bio

WHEN YOU HEAR music like this—the wild, loose, and woozy drags of guitar; the impossible beauty of it all—what kind of landscape presents itself in your mind? Vistas big enough to be forgotten in. Deserts which stretch back to the beginning of time. Infinite horizons melting into pink bokehs. It’s Texas, isn’t it?

Formed in 2017 in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, Glare aren’t so much genre traditionalists as they are painters of wide realms and intense moods. The four-piece blend has already accumulated a litany of dance, both in sound and their reputation for sell-out shows, in which they create a place where people go to short-circuit through sheer scope, or cross-referen- ces through sheer scope.

Sunset Funeral, the band’s debut LP, is a kind of shoegaze fever, where feeling super- sedes language. It’s music, as guitarist Toni Diaz puts it, “for people who don’t know how to talk about how they feel.” An album that’s been years in the making, Sunset Fu- neral is charged with unshakable grief, chronicling the loss of family and the love that travels through our souls, untethered and free. And of Glare overall, is how they ap- proach such a large, celestial sound with humble materials. Among the shoegaze re- vivalists, Glare come to the canvas with a more resourceful, DIY perspective than many of their peers. Glare’s music is too sublime, too huge to sound like it came from any kind of manmade instrument, tiny amp box or otherwise.

On first listen, Sunset Funeral—which scans as vast as desert sand—may over- whelm the senses. But look closer, and you’ll find a multiplicity of heavily crushed textures. ‘Heaven’s Gate,’ with its sensual chugging guitar line, dissolves the borders between bliss and doom. ‘Son 2 Tell,’ one of the album’s most gauzily romantic tracks, is both tense and translucent. ‘Ni Burn,’ a crunchy and lilting number, harkens back to the band’s grittier undergaze roots. But even when they clean to go hard, you can hear a softening in Glare’s sound com- pared to any of their previous releases, as they lean an attempt to find more tradi- tional pop song structure. This music drifts heavenward, to be sure, though it’s still as tortured as anything whose feelings speak louder than words.