Glass Ghost

Since the release of their debut album Idol Omen in 2009, Glass Ghost's founding members Eliot Krimsky and Michael Johnson have kept busy. In addition to playing dozens of shows, including a tour with White Rabbits, Johnson joined Dirty Projectors as their new drummer, Krimsky has been collaborating with Here We Go Magic on keys, and the duo welcomed two new members to the group, Tyler Wood on keyboards and percussion, and Aerial East on vocals. Like their debut, LYFE was produced by Tyler Wood, who also produced Joan As Policewoman’s 2014 album The Classic. For the LYFE recording sessions, the group recruited many of their friends to contribute, including Joan Wasser of Joan As Policewoman, Nat Baldwin of Dirty Projectors, and Christopher Tignor of Slow Six and Wires Under Tension. Pushing their songs to new levels by working with Brooklyn's musical elite is nothing new for Glass Ghost. They worked with more than a dozen of their friends from Brooklyn's music community, including Sharon Van Etten (who in 2011 noted “Eliot Krimsky is one of my favorite writers.”), Here We Go Magic's Luke Temple, and Matt Iwanusa of Caveman, for their debut which was described by the New Yorker as “elegant compositions of frosted indie pop,” and by Time Out New York as “weird and mournful yet highly rhythmic.” Glass Ghost has been refining their uncompromising aesthetic since they formed in 2008, after the breakup of their former band Flying. At the time, Johnson and Krimsky just felt the need to keep playing together, so they set up under Johnson's loft bed, and began to discover and then refine what would become their remarkably unique sound. Hours of jam sessions eventually yielded enough original material for a live set, where Glass Ghost would explore the powerful sounds they could deliver as a duo. Krimsky recalls “The first gig we played together was at a strange wedding in a hotel. I remember playing the first dance as the couple stiffly moved across the shiny hotel floor. That was one of the many absurd moments that Mike and I have shared.” Krimsky's keen observations of the absurd often inform his lyrics. On Idol Omen he managed to build beautiful songs like “What I've Seen” around observations of young businessmen in suits lighting a sleeping homeless man's hair on fire, and “Time Saving Trick” using bits of conversation he overheard while playing a lawyer's retirement party. On their new album LYFE, Krimsky (who's currently working on his M.A. in Media Studies at The New School, where he’s exploring the convergence of technological mediation, identity and music) turns his observations of the absurd and mundane into metaphors about living in a world where every detail about your life is harvested, quantified, and used by marketing companies to manipulate your behavior. Rather than sounding didactic or overly intellectual, the songs provide windows into the band's internal world, as Krimsky's tender falsetto glides over the icy landscapes of synths, strings, woodwinds, and regal horns. As the product of Krimsky, Johnson, and Wood's mutual trust, vision, and relentless attention to every detail, LYFE masterfully blends airy, melancholy, and chilly atmospherics with Glass Ghost's irresistible bottom-heavy grooves and hooky pop sensibilities.