Horse Jumper Of Love - ‘Disaster Trick’ review
Horse Jumper Of Love by POND Creative
This Friday sees the release of American indie-rock trio Horse Jumper of Love’s fifth album in eight years, Disaster Trick, showcasing some of the band’s strongest songwriting to date, and a steeper lean into their prevalent shoegaze undertones. Coming in with a run time of almost thirty-two minutes across eleven tracks—including pre-releases such as ‘Snow Angel’, ‘Wink’, ‘Today’s Iconoclast’, and ‘Gates of Heaven’—Disaster Trick compiles stories of heartbreak, tragedy, and the hopelessness that comes with trying to save what has long since been a lost cause.
Frontman Dimitri Giannopoulos regards Disaster Trick as “the first album I’ve ever done where I went into it with a very clear mind,” in reference to his recent sobriety, and the simplest fact is that this is reflected in every song. All eleven tracks on Disaster Trick seem, to me, to convey the gut-wrenching, soul-crushing experience of finally opening your eyes and coming to terms with an undeniable truth. It’s a familiar, desolate feeling: one that Horse Jumper of Love have captured, perfectly, again.
Starting the album off is pre-release ‘Snow Angel’, which dropped initially in June of 2024. With its melancholic guitar lead and intense instrumentals, a stark juxtaposition to Giannopoulos’ soft and mournful vocals, I can only describe ‘Snow Angel’ as a song that feels like it’s drowning. The first of many stories told across Disaster Trick, this track best conveys to me the anguish brought on by the passage of time: like looking back on your childhood and knowing that no amount of mourning can ever bring back the versions of yourself that have died, or the things you lost along with them.
Another pre-release, ‘Wink’, follows along with an equally despondent tone. Taking inspiration from Dimitry Bakin’s short story ‘Leaves’, ‘Wink’ tells the story of someone falling into the self-destructive cycle of trying to progress, only to wind up back where they started “with nothing to show for it”. Drummer James Doran keeps his performance subtle and repetitive, lending to the creation of an endless cycle—and the brilliance of the instrumental beginning to change, rising in hopeful octaves after the bridge only to fall devastatingly back down as the song’s opening lines are repeated, starting the cycle all over again, cannot go unnoticed.
The third track—and third previous single—, ‘Today’s Iconoclast’, is perhaps the track with the most charitable interpretation presented to us by Horse Jumper of Love. Where the rest of the album hits the listener with an indescribable sense of doom, gloom, and all-around despair, ‘Today’s Iconoclast’, with its tongue-in-cheeks references to the Bible and the crippling effects that clinging onto certain beliefs can have on a person, speaks to how the nature of iconoclasm makes room for the creation of new ideas—new beliefs, new attitudes, and new interpretations of the self. Taking an open eye and a clear to the preconceived notions you’ve structured your life around up until this very moment in time can, most often, lead to the creation of something beautiful. Something beautiful like Disaster Trick.
Horse Jumper of Love throw us right back into the deep end of tragedy with this next hit. ‘Word’, with a run time of three minutes and twenty-six seconds, spends every moment dragging your heart across the wet pavement of a busy road. Giannopoulos’ languid, grainy voice and defeated attitude in ‘Word’ couples bittersweetly with a simplistic and slow-paced instrumental. ‘Word’ is the sort of song that brings about the sensation of sitting alone in a quiet room, with all the lights turned off, and the world asleep outside—it has come to be one of my favourite tracks on the album, despite my typical preference for faster, louder, more hard-hitting music. The sense of defeat created by the story of ‘Word’ hits harder than most songs could ever hope to. ‘Word’ tells the tale of someone coming to terms with the fact that their relationship is over: more so, that it ended long ago, and that they’ve been holding on so long that letting go would be the only release on their atrophied muscles.
This air of tragedy carries itself unendingly through the rest of the album. Slightly more intense than the last few tracks, though maintaining Giannopoulos’ chillingly gentle vocal style, ‘Lip Reader’ comes flush with vitriolic distaste for the lacklustre familiarity of domesticity. In a wild 180-turn on that concept, ‘Wait By The Stairs’ seems to me like taking a foolish leap into devotion—rushing in while “deep in a dream”, being warned off moving too quickly while unable to “hear them in [your] fancy”. ‘Wait By The Stairs’, despite the running order, feels almost like a prelude to ‘Lip Reader’; and the mind-numbingly good outro to this track, both angelic and discordant, only cements my feeling that the characters in this story are ultimately doomed to face a bleak reality beyond their rose-tinted honeymoon love.
I couldn’t rattle on and on about tragedy without bringing your attention to track seven, ‘Heavy Metal’. In my opinion, Horse Jumper of Love’s music is carried—at no discredit to their stunning musical ability—by their lyricism. Interpreting each song has been my favourite part of listening to this album, and ‘Heavy Metal’ just might have been one of the most impactful messages I got from Disaster Trick. Similarly to ‘Wink’, ‘Heavy Metal’ takes the listener on a cyclical journey, though here the band warns of the dangers of generational trauma and the cycle of violence. It is, yet again, a melody of defeat: of the speaker’s inability to end the cycle, perpetuating this unending violence and bloodshed, and begging longingly for the next person to do what he could not; to finally find the strength to bring it to an end. We’re left with this ambiguous hope, resolution vacant. Despite having a similar run-time to most of the tracks on this album, ‘Heavy Metal’ was one of the few that left me longing for another verse, another chorus, a longer outro—perhaps to see the cycle through to its end. With no resolution, we’re forced to play the song on a loop in order to get our fill; and so, we perpetuate the cycle.
Though each listener is bound to have their own interpretation of the stories presented in Disaster Trick, track eight—‘Curtain’—comes across to me as an interesting approach to the concept of suicide. While usually a sensitive and tentatively approached topic of discussion, ‘Curtain’ depicts the anger felt by outside parties when someone elects to take their own life. “You wave that goodbye and they close the black curtain on you//when I find the words you’ll have closed the black curtain on me, too.” The song confronts the often-overlooked effect that suicide can have on one’s loved ones. It begs the question: “Could we split this tear in two?” Could the ultimate decision be negated by opening up to those around you, rather than keeping everything to yourself? By opening up to those around you, rather than keeping everything to yourself?
‘Death Spiral’, however, challenges this optimistic idea of sharing being caring. Driven by the power of bassist John Margaris, track nine views the concept of marriage from an outside perspective, rather cynically declaring a marriage pact as a downward spiral ‘til death do them part. If there was one thing to be said about this album, it’d be that nothing is safe from Horse Jumper of Love’s critical pessimism.
This pessimism can be self-critical, too, of course—especially in regards to track ten, the previously-released single ‘Gates of Heaven’. As Dimitri Giannopoulos himself said;
“Gates of Heaven is an old song I had been sitting on since 2015; I wrote it after a painful breakup and also after someone close to me had died. It was a soothing nostalgic melody that I played to help distract myself. When you’re young you think love is everything, but I think I was too immature to know what love or death meant. My persecution complex shows strong…I was trying to understand why these things were happening to me instead of trying to understand the pain those close to me were going through.”
Having heard Giannopoulos’ own thoughts on the song, it’s not an easy thing to miss. There is certainly something quite self-centred about the message; “The gates of heaven are always closing up on me.” It seems in some sense to me that ‘Gates of Heaven’ reflects the same attitude that ‘Curtain’ criticises—a focus on the self, “instead of trying to understand the pain those close to [oneself] were going through.”
Disaster Trick’s final track, ‘Nude Descending’, has got to be one of the more upbeat tracks on the album. It’s certainly the most experimental, branching out more into a classic indie-rock sound that fans of the genre will adore. The story that ‘Nude Descending’ presents is less one of failure or despair, instead offering a hesitant hope for a future. It brings us back to the concepts explored in ‘Today’s Iconoclast’—this idea of destroying previous beliefs in order to make way for something new and exciting. While Giannopoulos’ narrative voice repeatedly asserts the statement “You know I can’t spend the night”, trying to hold onto his casual attitude and stony-faced façade, ‘Nude Descending’ offers a tentative possibility of something more with its sudden tempo change and assertive bridge:
“Last night you were in my dreams
Well, you know what that means.”
It’s not all doom and gloom, see?
The fourth album now to have been released by Horse Jumper of Love under Run For Cover Records, Disaster Trick takes you on a journey, revisiting all the tensest moments in your life and forcing you to look back on them with a clear mind. It’s a stunning reflection of what time and maturity can do to your personal outlook. Horse Jumper of Love have absolutely smashed it with this one, and I look forward to seeing what they do n.ext
Disaster Trick from Horse Jumper of Love is out 16 August on Run For Cover Records and available on all good streaming platforms. This autumn, you can catch Horse Jumper of Love on their North American and European tours.
