Horse Jumper of Love announce 10 year anniversary deluxe edition of their self titled debut
Horse Jumper of Love | Photo credit: John Carney
Horse Jumper of Love's beloved self-titled debut album turns ten this year and to celebrate the band have announced a remastered and expanded deluxe edition of the record, arriving September 25th via Run For Cover Records.
Released quietly on Bandcamp and tape in 2016 by Disposable America, and then given a wider release on vinyl and streaming the following year by Run For Cover, Horse Jumper of Love is an album of scrappy, aching slowcore, that was written in a basement with the lowest expectations and has since become a true classic of the genre. This deluxe version remasters the original album (or perhaps more accurately, masters it for the first time) and offers a whopping thirteen bonus tracks of never-before-heard songs, alternate versions, and demos. Along with a booklet of handwritten guitar tabs, archival photos, and special packaging with hidden surprises, this deluxe edition is a lovingly assembled tribute to a seminal record and to the time, place, and spirit from which it emerged.
To mark the announcement Horse Jumper of Love have shared one of the previously unreleased tracks, ‘Heather (2013).’ The song is a surprisingly spritely primordial version of the self-titled record’s dirge-like ‘i love you very much forever’ that both stands on its own and offers new insight into the earliest days of Horse Jumper of Love.
Watch the ‘Heather (2013)’ music video via YouTube:
https://youtu.be/nVfppH4whJw
Stream ‘Heather (2013)’everywhere:
https://horsejumperoflove.lnk.to/heather2013
Preorder Horse Jumper of Love 10 Year Anniversary Deluxe Edition:
https://horsejumperoflove.lnk.to/horsejumperoflovedeluxe
In the decade since its releases Horse Jumper of Love has become widely regarded as an essential record of the 2010s, a key release that helped propel slowcore and shoegaze out of the musical dustbin and back into the indie rock zeitgeist. Now traces of the self-titled debutcan be heard in a new generation of sonically indebted groups like They Are Gutting A Body of Water, Teethe, Shallowater, and more.
The thirteen bonus tracks on Horse Jumper of Love10 Year Anniversary Deluxe Edition capture the particular gritty melancholy of the album’s original songs while inviting us further into the archive of a record the band thought no one would hear. Collected together as one body of work, Horse Jumper of Love and all of its contemporaneous material feels like a smudged, graphite portrait of that transition from adolescence to adulthood, illuminating the truth of what the original album always was: a potent snapshot of self-definition, the moment an artist crawls out of the dirt and into the world.
Horse Jumper of Love have also announced a run of US, UK, and EU tour dates where they'll be playing the self-titled record in full. See itinerary below.
Horse Jumper of Love 10 Year Anniversary Deluxe Edition track list:
DISC 1 (Horse Jumper of Love remastered)
1. Ugly Brunette
2. July 5th
3. Bagel Breath
4. Spaceman
5. I Want to Paint Horses… And to Have a Horse
6. DIRT
7. Sun Poisoning
8. i love you very much forever
9. Orange Peeler
DISC 2 (deluxe tracks)
1. Heather (2013)
2. Hole (Electric)
3. Bunny Ears
4. Ugly Brunette (4-Track)
5. DIRT (4-Track)
6. Spaceman (Demo)
7. Big Fat Worm
8. Graveyard Harmony (Upright Bass)
9. Mansion (2015 Demo)
10. Sick Anymore
11. Chariots (2013)
12. Spaceman (4-Track Instrumental)
13. Trees or Tape Hiss
Upcoming Shows:
09/25 Brooklyn, NY @ Warsaw %
10/10 Los Angeles, CA @ The Regent *
10/14 Austin, TX @ Antone’s ^
10/16 Chicago, IL @ Empty Bottle #
10/17 Chicago, IL @ Empty Bottle #
10/20 Detroit, MI @ The Loving Touch
10/21 Toronto, ON @ The Great Hall
10/23 Montreal, QC @ Toscadura
11/02 London, UK @ Pitchfork Festival
11/03 Bristol, UK @ Strange Brew
11/04 Manchester, UK @ YES (Pink Room)
11/05 Birmingham, UK @ Castle & Falcon
11/06 Glasgow, UK @ Room 2
11/08 Paris, FR @ Le Chinois
11/09 Bruges, BE @ Breaking Waves
11/10 Amsterdam, NL @ Cinetol
11/11 Berlin, DE @ Cassiopeia
11/13 Athens, GR @ Death Disco
11/14 Thessaloniki, GR @ Soul Ground Stage
11/16 Sofia, BG @ Club Pave
11/17 Bucharest, RO @ Control Club
11/20 Lisbon, PT @ ZDB
11/22 Barcelona, ES @ Jamboree
11/23 Madrid, ES @ Sala Clamores
11/24 Dublin, IE @ The Grand Social
% w/ special guest & 22° Halo
* w/ Dutch Interior & Shallowater
^ w/ Dead Sullivan & Amelia’s Best Friend
# w/ Flooding
Biography:
Sometimes the best art happens when no one is paying attention. That was certainly the case for Horse Jumper of Love’s self-titled debut, an album of scrappy, aching slowcore, written in a basement, quietly put on Bandcamp and tape in 2016 by Disposable America, and then given a wider release on vinyl and streaming the following year by Run For Cover Records. The album's extremely humble origins might seem incongruous with its outsized impact—a decade on Horse Jumper of Love is widely regarded as an essential record of the 2010s, a key release that helped propel slowcore and shoegaze out of the musical dustbin and back into the indie rock zeitgeist—but at the time of its creation, the young band couldn’t have had lower expectations. Now, in celebration of the album’s tenth anniversary, Horse Jumper of Love and Run For Cover have expanded and re-mastered this cult classic, including a booklet of handwritten guitar tabs, archival photos, and an additional disc of unreleased b-sides, demos, and alternate versions. It’s a lovingly assembled tribute to a seminal record and to the time, place, and spirit from which it emerged.
In the spring of 2016, Horse Jumper of Love (guitarist/vocalist Dimitri Giannopoulos, bassist John Margaris, and drummer James Doran) were a fresh-faced trio of teenagers making a name for themselves in the Boston house show circuit. "I started writing these songs in my parents’ basement when I was nineteen years old,” explains Giannopoulos. He had no intentions with it besides the hope he’d make back the small amount of money it had taken to record. “It’s truly a slacker album in that way, one that could only have been born out of the shamelessness of being a worm. It came because it had to, because I was en route to fully submitting to mental illness and self-destruction. You put your art out because you burn to tap into some universal truth and make the world feel less alien. In hindsight, it was very pure.” That bone-deep need for self-expression permeated Horse Jumper of Love and helped it connect with an unexpectedly dedicated audience on Bandcamp before catching the attention of ascending label, Run For Cover, who pressed it to vinyl and spurred the momentum further. Soon the band’s small local following was expanding to message boards, then to tastemaker outlets like Stereogum, Pitchfork, and NPR, and suddenly the group found themselves at the start of what would become a real career as professional musicians.
In a few short years Horse Jumper of Love went from playing in Boston basements to headlining tours worldwide, performing at high profile festivals, and opening for their influences like Duster. And now in turn, traces of their self-titled debutcan be heard in a new generation of sonically indebted groups like They Are Gutting A Body of Water, Teethe, Shallowater, and more. Such quick canonisation might seem like a surprising trajectory for these soft-spoken, rough around the edges songs, but Horse Jumper of Love has become a modern classic, its elegiac tracksare slowcore staples and its hand-drawn cover art (illustrated by Giannopoulos) is instantly recognisable. The sentiment of this music and Giannopoulos’ yearning delivery has had an undeniable staying power, a sense of purity and universality that rings timeless. “I see now that it has a lot to do with family and a transition between dependence and alienation,” he says. “This album feels like a portrait of that alienation as I was coming into it: I had moved out, dropped out of community college, had no direction, fell in love, got heartbroken, etc. I was 19 when I started writing the album, 21 when I finished it. I didn't think many people would hear it. I got embarrassed, like waking up hungover after revealing too much at the bar in front of people you don't know.”
The thirteen bonus tracks on the 10 Year Anniversary Deluxe Edition (most of which were recorded by Giannopoulos himself) capture the particular gritty melancholy of the album’s original songs while inviting us further into the archive of a record the band thought no one would hear. ‘Ugly Brunette (4-Track)’ strips the album’s opener to its barest confessional mode, like overhearing an afternoon basement rehearsal. ‘Heather (2013)’ shows the influence of spritelier 2010s indie rock on Giannopoulos’ earliest songwriting, an influence which the band has embraced melodically as much as they’ve resisted it formally (the band would go on to slow ‘Heather’ down to a dirge-like pace, transforming it into the self-titled record’s ‘i love you very much forever’). One can easily access the feeling of being a teenager sick in bed and stuck at home, searching for something novel in the doleful riffs of previously unreleased ‘Sick Anymore.’
Collected together as one body of work, Horse Jumper of Love and all of its contemporaneous material feels like a smudged, graphite portrait of that transition from adolescence to adulthood, illuminating the truth of what the original album always was: a potent snapshot of self-definition, the moment an artist crawls out of the dirt and into the world.
Follow Horse Jumper of Love:
Website / Instagram / Facebook / Bandcamp
