Drop Nineteens - Hard Light - White Smoke Color Vinyl Record

Drop Nineteens released Delaware in 1992, followed it with the stranger National Coma, shared stages with Radiohead, Blur, Hole and PJ Harvey, then walked away. Hard Light, out on Wharf Cat in 2023, is the record that came thirty years later, and it arrives with none of the awkwardness that usually attends a reunion.

Greg Ackell writes the lyrics, but this is a genuinely collaborative band again: Motohiro Yasue, Steve Zimmerman, Paula Kelley and Peter Koeplin built the album across studios around the country over the course of a year. The result keeps the blurred guitars and half-buried melodies that made Delaware a shoegaze touchstone, then lets songs like Scapa Flow and the seven-minute closer T stretch into something looser and more assured. Kelley's arrangement of the Clientele's Policeman Getting Lost is a quiet highlight.

Pressed on white smoke color vinyl, a fitting finish for a record built out of haze.

Tracklist
1. Hard Light (3:05)
2. Scapa Flow (3:59)
3. Gal (4:08)
4. Tarantula (3:13)
5. The Price Was High (3:34)
6. Rose with Smoke (2:31)
7. A Hitch (3:28)
8. Lookout (2:24)
9. Another One Another (4:49)
10. Policeman Getting Lost (2:28)
11. T (7:25)