Quality Living

Quality Living's catalog reads as a series of sharp turns: the buttoned-up indie pop of their 2016 self-titled debut, the shaggy slacker-rock of 2020's Something Softly Caught Me, then a run of singles that grew progressively dreamy and askew. In that time, they've become a New Jersey staple, winning followers with songs that are eccentric, colorful, and sneakily catchy. Glacier, the band's third album and first vinyl release, brings those disparate threads into focus. Its ten songs of weathered, ramshackle indie rock foreground the vitality and earnestness of the Jersey punk/emo scene that shaped them. This record echoes the unsettled, off-kilter indie rock of Modest Mouse and Alex G, but it doesn't take long to hear the other neighborhoods it calls home. Much of Glacier's guitar interplay, lurching tempos, and organic production recalls Jade Tree or Chapel Hill bands, while its threads of pedal steel, loping rhythms, and twangy riffs pull it into the territory of Americana. Created in a garage full of office supplies over the course of two years, Glacier's stories take place in a collage of locales: dingy hotel rooms, lowlit bars, autumn woods, deep blue living rooms, bonfires, turnpikes, purple front lawns, barefoot snowdrifts. Its characters teeter between tenderness and whiplash. Most of them are trying their best. Glacier releases October 23rd.