Weatherday
Hornet Disaster
TOPSHELF
ABOVE THE CURRENT
When we talk about the “post-genre” music landscape in 2025, an important component of the conversation that seems to go overlooked is the fact that music is not only falling into preconceived categories of sound less and less, but there’s also significantly fewer categorizations for those sounds being proposed. Ours is a self-conscious culture that could never coin something as earnestly silly as “shoegaze” again (or as ironically silly as “shitgaze”) if only out of fear of attracting the steady flow of ire consistently being directed toward Spotify for generating those annoying daylist titles.
I bring this up not because I’m a stickler for such things, but because the Swedish songwriter enigmatically known only as Sputnik seems to hold a certain regard for such classifications nearly as steadily as they aim to exist in a space between them. Since finding cult success with the blown-out noise-pop of their Weatherday project in 2018, Sputnik has ventured into the realms of synthwave, conceptual art-pop, and ear-splitting shoegaze through various solo projects extraneous to the one they’re most known for, going so far as to create individual Bandcamp pages for each outlet despite evident aesthetic similarities binding them all together. Perhaps more importantly, since the release of their debut album Come In in 2019, a global scene has formed around the lo-fi sounds of Weatherday, with Seoul’s Parannoul and Asian Glow and Rio de Janeiro’s sonhos tomam conta all notably basking in the same unidentified blend of shoegaze, indietronica, and emo.
Which brings us to Weatherday’s newly released second album, Hornet Disaster, a project that hardly feels like something we’ve waited six years for after a steady release of orbiting Sputnik material and a nascent genre forming around Come In. Made up of nearly twice as many songs as its predecessor was, this new chapter may be just as thematically driven as that record, but it also explores a considerably wider array of sounds (and languages, for that matter) across its 19 tracks, all through cleaner production. Early cuts “Meanie” and “Angel” introduce the loopy guitar riffs that define Marnie Stern’s output as a leitmotif to back Sputnik’s familiarly wavering vocal performances, while the influence of Phil Elverum’s demo-quality, black-metal-coded slacker rock as Mount Eerie seeps in shortly after, eventually giving way to wholly original compositions such as “Chopland Sedans,” which bake in Beach Boys harmonies and a hyperpop gloss between its anxious-anthemic choruses. If that isn’t disorienting enough, the first thing we hear when it’s over is the voice of Sheldon from Big Bang Theory.
Although it can often feel like the record is pulling the listener in various directions, catching Weatherday’s live set in support of the album this week felt like seeing the next big punk crossover act signed to a label that’s recently introduced us to Sweet Pill, Ekko Astral, and, yes, Parannoul. Even on the new record there isn’t much material that wasn’t already teased by releases from Lola’s Pocket PC or Five Pebbles, while even the compositions reminiscent of Come In feel sewn together by a sense of persistent buzzing that isn’t unlike a mass of hornets so great that it warrants a dramatic descriptive term like “disaster” to quantify it. I’m not sure what to call the inevitable uptick of new releases we’re about to hear that all roughly sound like this, but Hornet Disaster will likely remain at its whirring core.
