Standing on the shoulders of Giant Day
They might be giants - Giant Day’s Emily and Derek live; press photo courtesy of the band.
More than the vibes have been off as of late. While there is always a degree of head spinning amount of regressive trends to contend with on any given day, the stability of our fractured society remains in the balance. Uncertainty is always, and the vortexes of chaos remain a constant, but the drum beat of authoritarianism has long since crossed the Rubicon. As we collectively and cautiously move throughout these troubling times; the challenge is to find ways to move forward toward a better place. The challenge of contributing a brighter degree of kindness to our own ecosystems. Finding new ways to offer support to the most vulnerable folks in our communities. Finding ways to maintain under anxious conditions that offer a sense of sanity, comfort, and constructive confrontation.
Engaging with all this and more is Giant Day with the urgent new album Alarm from the Elephant 6 collective. The duo of Derek Almstead (from Elf Power, The Glands, of Montreal, The Olivia Tremor Control, etcetera) and Emily Growden (of Marshmallow Coast, Faster Circuits) ring the bells that strike with tones of high alert, and an even higher degree of ethereality. Having made the move from Athens to a family farm in Pennsylvania; they follow up Glass Narcissus with a timely record of warning that is just as urgent as it approaches the dawn treading gates of the ephemeral. The two together combine their talents in the face of the threats to our democracy, our worlds, our humanity, all through the power of song that examines everything from the material, spiritual, and supernatural scales of comprehension and manifestation.
Alarm strikes through the atmosphere with well crafted klaxons of care and consciousness. "Out of Hand" wanders through the tributaries of incontrollable currents in a dizzying frenzy of feeling that borders on the frantic like the paralyzed portions of the mind during the startling heat of an emergency. The turbulent waters drift into the jagged rain beds of "Golden Times" that graze through the lysergic fields of daffodils and reeds that zap the concepts of the self toward dimensions unknown. The tense dissociation mind daze of "Without Warning" is comprised of the historical materials of past/present psych pop inspirations that mirrors one another down a cosmic hall of creative mirrors.
"Healthy Families Virginia" moves between time, geography and consciousness on the wings of mindfully generous dove in the daydream fantasia of walking the distance in another person's proverbial shoes. "Paoli" spelunks rhythmically through complex electro corridors, before arriving at the motorik majesty of paranormal pomp "King of Ghosts" that bops like a groovy haunted house happening. The flying low to the ground state of made is felt on "Back to the Corner", bringing that attitude and spirit through a carefully restrained and calculated economy of maximalism on "Spite 28": a compass twisting dissolve into the anxiety attack abyss. Soaring into the stratosphere's inviting embrace and intonations of hope, Giant Day sing an endearing call of caution, a humble reminder to making space and time for the self. Emily unleashes the hounds of heck on the cursed kennels and malicious creeps on "Devil Dog", before dissecting the vicious visages of "Scowl at Me" that ascends above the menacing faces in a mesmerizing transcendence.
The duo continue on the high flying elevation that populates the gravity of Alarm, creating the feeling of a star falling into the arms of the forest on "New Hollow", foregoing the frowning fort retreats on the harmonizing high rising inflections that increasingly rise upward of "My Warm Smile". The Giants bring it all back to the goodness of home on "Good Neighbor", that offers their community more than an insurance policy sales pitch that instead sails toward a more abundant and incusive way of cooperative communions.
Emily Growden and Derek Almstead provided the following in-depth track song breakdown:
Giant Day’s Alarm track by track
“Out Of Hand”
Emily Growden: Cult-think is so prevalent in our society. I find myself really angry with these people for apparently abandoning reason and the slow, thoughtful work required for real growth and maturation; instead doubling and tripling down on cheap narcissistic bullshit. I recognize that some are genuinely searching for peace in their own ways, but many are also completely self-centered and dangerous. My anger is focused on members of political hate-cults. When a person joins a cult of hate, no good will come of trying to reason with them or trying to see things from their point of view- you’ve just got to let them go.
Derek Almstead: This came out of a guitar part that was almost like a joke it's so stupid simple; practically like a guitar tuning pattern. I titled it “Dumb As Hell” in my voice notes app, where I store up ideas for songs like most people do. I guess I liked the meter change of it so I kept it around...I assumed Emily would laugh at it. We had Gary Olson of The Ladybug Transistor add trumpets. It's like a call to arms; the march of an advancing army, which made it the obvious album opener. We both had some love for math rock and were big on Shudder To Think back in the day, and some of that stuff slips through.
“Golden Times”
EG: Lyrically, “Golden Times” explores the mind of a cult leader; a successful narcissist and charlatan who is fulfilling the fantasy of absolute power. The only I can save you way of thinking which is causing so much damage to our country.
DA: After Bill Doss died in 2012, The Olivia Tremor Control ended, and I toured a lot as a sound engineer and had a lot of time by myself. During that time I fell in love with the Cocteau Twins albums Blue Bell Knoll, Heaven Or Las Vegas and Four Calendar Cafe and listened to them maybe 100 times in headphones… on the bus, on the plane, etc. It took me awhile to realize why I find their music so moving, and when I did it helped clarify something I’d been searching for in my own writing. The chord changes and beats- the music itself is beautiful, but uncomplicated and fairly straightforward. Obviously Elizabeth Fraser’s voice and melodies are absolute magic, but her lyrics are indecipherable, so your imagination really carries a lot of weight. I feel like that’s similarly a huge part of what makes My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless so sticky- leaving all of that space for the listener's brain to react to and create. That creative listening component is what’s been keeping me excited about music my whole life, but the studio makes it a little too easy to come up with ideas to fill up that space. I’ve really limited the elements with which I’ve allowed myself to write, and try to keep it simple. So yeah, this is a shoegaze song, but th model is something that we’re applying to everything we’re doing.
I fell into this very simple visual pattern on the guitar last fall while writing this, and realized it was almost definitely the way Will Hart wrote The Olivia Tremor Control’s “Green Typewriters 10”- the one with the refrain “If you’re ready to come back down, I’ll be waiting here/ All your friends will be around/ I promise I’ll wait here forever”. It’s a simple II-VI-III progression, but he never uses “cowboy chords”- instead he uses easy patterns with a bunch of open strings. I was excited to show him that I had discovered it and how I’d recycled it, but I didn’t get the chance. He was such a big cheerleader for the last record. I was going to surprise him with this mountain of tunes, but I wanted to get them to a place where they were closer to completion. I spent all of October 2024 building up a demo structure for every song fragment I had laying around, and I ended up with 33 pieces. I created basic arrangements to use the skeletons on which the songs were built, and bounced them off Emily for feedback. Then I spent all of November adding live drums while getting my chops up for my December tour playing drums with The Ladybug Transistor. Will passed away the day before I left for tour. It was a real blow to our whole community let alone this project, but I know he would have been psyched about it.
“Without Warning”
DA: It reminds me of the Who, or maybe later period Led Zeppelin? Now that the record is finished, my main interaction with this tune is playing guitar on it live—this narrows my viewpoint, but playing it makes me feel 14. I got serious about playing music and became obsessed with guitar at round that age, so a lot of those influences are still frozen in me, especially since I shelved guitar as my main focus. I picked up bass when I was 17 because the bass player in high school jazz band quit and they needed a bass player more than a guitarist. I piddled around on the drums here and there but didn’t really start playing them until Of Montreal started. Next thing you know I’ve spent 30 years being a bass player and a drummer. It’s been fun to get back into guitar again. This is one of the very first songs I wrote specifically for Giant Day in spring of 2023, but it took a little while to gel. We wrote the melody together and threw in few layers of cut and paste. Emily did a lyric sheet chop-up, and we chopped the melody up again to create a bit more pop-art repetition out of it.
EG: This is my favorite. I was reading a book of Faulkner’s short stories when I wrote the lyrics and I was in an American mood. I imagine a people who are enraged by the abuse of an oppressive leader, so they pluck him from society, rebuild, and make sure that this sort of exploitation of power can never happen again. I was recovering from covid when we recorded it, and you can really hear it in my voice. I think it works well with the subject matter…kind of worn out and sick of it.
“Healthy Families Virginia”
DA: At its center this is a time travel song; talking to my parents about me having been a shitty outsider teenager and a real drag to be around. I really fell in love with music in 1982 when I was 7. My family had to move to find work, and so every Monday at 5 AM my mom and I would drive from our house in the country -which my parents built themselves- to the small town where she’d started a new job and I’d started at a new school. My dad and younger brother stayed back home. We'd listen to these beautiful mix tapes my parents made- Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, The Dead, etc. We'd spend the week in town and then go back home to the country on weekends, so I spent my 3rd grade year feeling sort of alone and separated. I started acting out and being a bit of a troubled kid at that point. It was the walkman era, and I spent a lot of my time in headphones listening to the Top 40 music that my parents hated. Hall and Oates, Tears for Fears, Thriller in headphones really blew me away. I give my dad a lot of credit when it comes to my interest in music because he was so excited to talk about it- not only specifically about what he liked, but also in the abstract about larger concepts- but my mom was the one who taught me piano. She was actually playing classical music in the house on a daily basis and put it within reach.
“Paoli”
DA: The intent going into the making of this record was to do a lot more dub-style remixing, but I just never had time. I wanted a transition track between “Healthy Families” and the dance-y mood of “King Of Ghosts”, so I quickly threw this together the night before our deadline. I set up my studio in such a way as to make all of my outboard effects really easy to integrate in mix creation- kind of how I imagine a lot of original dub mixes were done- and it’s a great break from our usual painstaking songwriting approach. I can push things through the system and let the ideas flow and be surprised by what comes out. This piece is really just scratching the surface. I’m planning on getting more into that next time around.
“King Of Ghosts”
EG: In my mind this song lives alongside the Elia Kazan movie A Face In The Crowd, about a power-hungry populist cult leader. He destroys every relationship in his world in order to dominate it. If you set your sights on destruction in the name of power, prepare for haunting loneliness at the end. The Percy Shelley poem “Ozymandias” was a big inspiration…
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
DA- I remember having Berlin's "Metro" in my head when this song was just a demo (Spite #5). It’s got a bit of an early 80s disco-pop vibe with maybe a little of the Pointer Sisters. I like the simple bass line with that little twist in it. This was fun to make, just grooving. We had considered it finished when Jamey Robinson from Buffalo Stance offered to add another layer of these great dancing synth parts at the last minute… now we can't imagine the song without it.
“Back To The Corner”
EG: The first time I read Derek’s lyrics for this I cried… I had completely misunderstood them. I thought they were expressing a longing to protect women, minorities and the LGBTQIA+ community from all of the mistreatment the regime has in mind for them. It slowly dawned on me while singing it that it’s written from the thuggish point of view of the regime itself… you’ll pay the price or you’ll end up hurt… I have no idea how I could’ve misunderstood that. These mobsters threatening us that if we don’t slink away and keep quiet we can’t expect to be safe. It’s a really disgusting song—one of three on this record along with “Golden Times” and “Scowl At Me”, written from the point of view of the regime. But it’s so pretty I think it’ll be a bit of a confuser, like R.E.M.’s “The One I Love”. It never made me cry again but it does make me furious.
DA: It’s pretty but a little dissonant in the chord structure, nothing too fancy but… I’m trying to hold that consonance/dissonance balance through most of this album. I wrote the lyrics in January 2025 but it almost made the last record as an instrumental. It was built out of the demo Spite #2 which had much heavier almost trip-hop feel, and this WILDY different.
“Spite 28”
EG: I absolutely love Derek’s bass line. The song went through a lot of iterations and was such a pain in the ass to figure out that it was almost abandoned, but how can you abandon a bass line like that? It was a bit of a tough vocal for me- we were still not fully recovered from a case of covid by our recording deadline. It took a full three months to get my voice back into shape. Now that I think of it, both of our voices were diminished throughout the entire recording process, other than “Back To The Corner”, which was recorded before our bout in April 2025. There were a lot of takes.
DA: I really liked this idea, but it was difficult to get going and almost didn't make the record. At some point I exasperatedly sent it to Jamey from Buffalo Stance and asked him Is this even music? I wanted to make something super grand and transcendent, and I'm not sure it ever really got where I imagined it could go…sometimes you just have accept what a song has become. The basic idea- like a lot of the songs on this and our previous album- came out of a demo I made in 2018-19 over the holidays when I was writing a song a day for a month. We were pissed off at an unreliable collaborator at the time, and started a sarcastic joke project called Spite where we would just be a duo so we wouldn’t have to rely on them… pretty interesting that it ended up being reality. Each demo was titled/numbered “Spite 1, 2, etc.”. This was the very last one I made and the only one that gets to keep its original title. Our friend Dave “The Diminsher” McDonnell added a great keyboard section.
“Think Carefully”
DA: Inspired in parts by Richard Davies, The Zombies and Soft Machine... I wanted to jokingly call it “Scared of Cell 44” but Emily vetoed it (rightly). A little dark sarcastic nightmare fantasy about the increasing gravity of the prison system. It’s got some fun time changes in and is kind of a math rock song in that the arrangement keeps folding into shorter and shorter sections of itself.
EG: This is inviting you to imagine how you might best spend your time in the detention center when they come for you. Initially we planned to call the record The Horror and center it lyrically on different scary concepts. By the time we were nearing completion we realized that though most of the lyrics are indeed about scary things, they’re based in reality rather than in the paranormal. It doesn’t make anything less scary—it makes it more—but it also makes it more about stress than horror. Alarm is a portmanteau of all to arms so we went with that. Horror feels like something that’s already happened and is sinking in—an alarm is a call to action.
In session with Emily and Derek of Giant; press photo courtesy of the artists.
“Devil Dog”
EG: This is another rage and revenge song. I like to set aside a little time everyday to quietly remind myself that all the tyrants in the world will one day die; that their works will be forgotten and undone. Just the same as me. This song is a way for me to remind myself out loud.
DA: Mike Watt was my biggest influence when I was getting into bass as a teenager- I eventually even had a Minutemen cover band in Athens, GA in the 2010s called The Fucking Corndogs- and the song started from a bass line in which I hear a lot of him. I feel like this is me getting closer to the sci-fi rockabilly guitar style I’m attracted to. We wanted to imbue it with danceable angularity, à la XTC and early Athens art party bands like Pylon and the B52s.
“Scowl At Me”
EG: Another bad guy POV exploration. We’re channelling an evil mouthpiece, explaining away fascism and cruelty by calling it progress. Think White House Press Secretary- one of these lying assholes reveling in pain and chaos. I lifted a few of these lines from some high school poetry I rediscovered in the attic. I love to think of teenaged-me and adult-me working together on bitchy art.
DA- Probably the most poppy of these songs, maybe even a little twee... another one of these guitar based songs where you just move a chord shape around on the guitar and it opens up all of this fun deep harmony and an inherent drone element. I like to combine dumb move-your-hands-around ideas with a little sneaky layer of key changes that you won't really notice.
Cover art for Alarm.
“New Hollow”
DA- Where we live it’s beautiful and bleak in the winter… sometimes it can make you kind of paranoid and lonely, because we barely interact with anyone unless we are out on the road. Most of the time we’re just holed up, deep into projects. This was originally “Spite 11” and the only tune on the record on which we kept the synth bass outline from the writing session demo. I’m proud of the extremely sparse arrangement- I think it feels full and swimming with sonic visual imagery.
EG: As with most of these songs, we didn’t set out to tell a particular story—one just vaguely emerged. “New Hollow” explores modern rural paranoia and the fear of otherness. These days we live in the country where the people are few and far between. We’ve met some like-minded folks, but our valley is overwhelmingly supportive of the regime. It’s difficult to understand their motives—most are in serious need of health care, government assistance and education for their children. Something scary has persuaded them to seek their own destruction—like the parasite that makes mice unafraid of cats.
“My Warm Smile”
DA: Very spring season—opening and warm. This was made in order to contrast “New Hollow” from within the same form. We made this record throughout the winter and were racing to finish it in the early spring. This is a reflection of that mood shift. With the round-style vocal arrangement it’s obviously very Beach Boys, which is to me most perennial of American music, and I wanted this record to be very American.
EG: We’re both realists, but it’s in our nature to lean towards optimism and try to take the long view. We wanted to close with a reminder that beauty exists—love exists. Remember to spare time for joy and make art however you can.
“Good Neighbor”
DA: I inherited this beaten up Rhodes from my friend Ross Shapiro of The Glands when he passed away. I spent about a month rebuilding it and wrote a bunch of music on it once it was all fixed up. This is from one of those ideas. Another one I struggled getting together for the album; I tried many arrangements before I took a little psychedelic journey with it in the studio and unlocked it. I like the stark contrast between spritely music and existential threat. It makes me think of Dr. Strangelove when Slim Pickens rides the bomb.
EG: “New Hollow/My Warm Smile” was slated to be the album closer, but because Glass Narcissus closed with another haunting, pastoral song which kind of invoked our backyard at night we decided to change it up. “Good Neighbor” winds it up with a positive note on the palate, even if it is sung partly from the point of view of a nuclear bomb. That final line “call if you need anything” expresses our view that what we need now is community and clear-headedness. And it’s great to end on a note from Ross’s Rhodes.
Giant Day’s new album Alarm is available now via The Elephant Six Recording Co.