DISTANCE FIGHTER
released JUNE 27, 2025
ALBUM 54, RELEASE 151
I got my 4-track fixed and decided to make an album with it. Somewhere along the way, I got frustrated and took everything I had and dumped it all into Reaper to finish the songs there. This is the result. It's a mess but it doesn't pretend it isn't. The opener, "Big Red Hand Emerges From Black Thunder", is a slow and punishing metal song. I thought it would be funny to start the album with something like that. "Something For A Void" is a diatribe against generative AI, which I think I started writing a lot of songs about right around here. While it's still here, may as well use my brain to write about what happens when you don't. "For" is my favorite song on here. Every line uses the word "for". "Sequel To An Old Song You'll Never Hear" is what it says it is. I wrote a song in 2016 called "Old Stability" about losing interest in bands I previously liked. This is an update to that. "World Cafe Dead" is my biggest regret on here. That's a great riff, and I feel like I wasted it on this big mess that never really finds its footing. "Just Checking In" is my other favorite song on here. It starts in 5/4 but moves to 6/4 and it works really nicely. "All My Best" was originally much slower, but after I recorded the drums (with a tambourine) I thought it was dragging its feet so I sped it up a great deal and suddenly this emerged. Live breakbeats, anyone? "That Wasn't Very Ice Of You" was the second half of a longer whammy-based guitar thing that eventually turned into "Legend Buried" a few albums later. "Distance Fighter", the title track, rounds out a trilogy of songs in this album's back half that ignore melody and harmony in favor of noise and agony. The last song, "Living & Breathing", might be a motivational song of some kind. The snippet at the end developed into "We Back Inaction" on the next album. I remember finishing this album and thinking I'd really made something far removed from "power pop". I had no idea how much more I had in me for this sort of thing.