It makes sense that even in the height of the casual season, Horse Jumper of Love are here to slow things down even more. The Boston-born trio, which just played Royale with DIIV last week, is set to release new album Disaster Trick this Friday via Run For Cover Records, and set a slowcore mood yesterday (August 12) with a hazy drifter called “Word.”
With an appropriately moody video directed by Ben Turok, frontman Dimitri Giannopoulos breaks it all down: “This song is about the distortion of reality, specifically how your sense of time and reality becomes distorted through someone else’s sense of it… You try to fit into someone else’s idea of their future, because of love or indecision or insecurity. Maybe that someone is more confident than you and has power over you? An issue I’ve struggled with is feeling unworthy of creating my own future, so I’ve relied on other people for guidance, whether it was family, friends, or lovers.”
Giannopoulos adds: “This theme is boiled down in this song as a fight between two romantically involved people and how love and the anxiety associated with it is so powerful it can make you feel separate from the rest of the world. This distortion reveals itself in the lyric ‘Milking of the ax handle’ a literal image of distorted reality. I got the idea from the movie Häxan when they show a drawing of a witch milking an ax instead of a cow.”
Horse Jumper of Love head back on the road over the next few months with shows across the UK, Europe, and North America. At the tail end of the gentle romp is a November 21 appearance at The Sinclair in Cambridge with Spencer Radcliffe & Everything and Primal Rat Screw.