After an almost two-decade break between albums, Kansas City post-hardcore outfit Shiner returned in 2020 with a fifth album called Schadenfreude. To be fair, they broke up in 2003, a couple of years after their fourth album The Egg had been released. They remained so until 2012, when they reconvened for a brief reunion, and then properly reunited in 2015. Another five years on from Schadenfreude, the band’s sixth full-length is on the way. Titled BELIEVEYOUME, it’s an album that carries both the weight of the world and the members’ ages on its shoulder, ruminating on the passage of time with musical and lyrical gravitas.
The project’s latest single “The Alligator” utilizes that wisdom and experience to comment upon an age-old but also increasingly modern phenomenon. Over a trippy and hypnotic groove—which epitomizes the musical experimentation that underpins this collection—the song builds slowly but surely up from the foundation of its off-kilter melody until it explodes in a spectacularly moody crash of noise. “It’s a song about control,” says frontman Allen Epley, who founded the band in 1992. “It’s about control artists, gaslighters, love bombers, and the ilk who can manipulate others sometimes without even knowing they’re doing it. They hold all the cards in the relationship and can provide and take away. It’s slap and tickle and slap again. Classic abuse and controlling ploys.
“The odd-timed groove seemed to draw these lyrics out of me,” he continues. “The first thing put down was the initial two-guitar loop and I then built the chord progression off that. I considered breaking into a straight groove at some point, but the song wanted to feel that five-beat pattern throughout. When we got to the ending section, I didn’t have the chords finished until Jason Gerken came over and hummed the part to me. I was like ‘Ah!’ So really Gerken wrote the ending explosion!”
Listen to the song—and that ending explosion—below, and pre-order BELIEVEYOUME here.
