Horse Jumper of Love
Disaster Trick
RUN FOR COVER
ABOVE THE CURRENT
Horse Jumper of Love are no strangers to the void. With the release of their self-titled 2016 debut, frontman Dimitri Giannopoulos confessed to having a phase where he thought “nothing was real” as a teenager, and since then, their music has always had a hint of the dissociative. Hazy interludes give way to tidal waves of sound anchored by tiny details: the “kiss” of throwing up into a trashcan on 2019’s “John Song,” a favorite shirt ruined by bleach on their breakout track “Ugly Brunette.”
For their new album Disaster Trick, the signature slowcore sound established on their debut is reborn. Horse Jumper’s last release, 2023’s Heartbreak Rules EP, stripped their work down to the bone with Giannopoulos largely on solo acoustic guitar, but the new record brings back the noise, stitching their gentle and heavy sounds back together in a cathartic return to form. Their production process has recentered, too. Rather than “show up at a studio, drink, and record,” the newly sober Giannopoulos says he and the band approached Disaster Trick with clarity, traveling to Asheville’s Drop of Sun Studios to work with producer Alex Farrar. There, they were joined by the studio’s recent alums Karly Hartzman and MJ Lenderman of Wednesday and Ella Williams of Squirrel Flower.
The result is an album where their vision feels clearer than ever. Giannopoulos cites Leonard Cohen’s Songs From a Room as a touchstone for Disaster Trick, and like Cohen’s, his lyrics have a subtle mysticism that spins out into wry observations. “You blamed it on the moon, but that’s not very fair to the moon,” he sings of a fight with a partner on “Word.” “Today’s Iconoclast,” meanwhile, references the “Amazon Basics Bible” and unpacks the mundane phantasmagoria of “fuck, marry, kill.” In the music video, Giannopoulos paces alone in a motel room, playing a guitar with a nearby phone hanging off the hook as massive mirrors on the wall and ceiling uncomfortably reflect his gaze back to him.
This is a dance that Disaster Trick often accomplishes: one between loneliness and discomfiting closeness, the hunger for and fear of intimacy. It’s echoed in the album’s many allusions: “Death Spiral” balks at Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You,” and on “Nude Descending” an aversion to spending the night leads Giannopoulos to compare himself to a naked, unrecognizable Duchamp figure. “I felt like needing your embrace,” he quips, a disaffected oxymoron. Elsewhere, the garden metaphor on “Wink” calls back to “Ugly Brunette.”
In moments like these, it feels like Horse Jumper of Love isn’t just evolving, but considering its own nihilism from a new angle. The intoxicating sink of their earlier work is garnished with something a little more hopeful, a little more self-aware. In a way, the band is literally looking back—“Gates of Heaven,” for instance, is a previously unfinished track from years ago. But there’s a sense of determination alongside this retrospection, a pursuit of honesty and connection that shines through the darkness. “I know it sounds dramatic,” Giannopolous acknowledges at the close of “Death Spiral.” “But I must describe the way that it felt.”
