—andmoreagain presents—
Nihilistic Easyrider
w/ On Being an Angel
at Kings
Raleigh, NC
doors 7pm // show 8pm
$16 adv // $18 day of show
Tickets on sale now
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NIHILISTIC EASYRIDER
Nihilistic Easyrider is the brainchild of Narrow Head frontman Jacob Duarte—but make no mistake, he’s not going solo. With DELUXE EDITION, Duarte provides us with diaristic vignettes of a life in perpetual motion, offering a more introspective view into the preoccupations of a songwriter whose life revolves around the stage but is ultimately lived elsewhere. While not exactly intent on writing pop music, Duarte nonetheless masterfully wades through many its core preoccupations: the anticipation of the night to come, sex as love, love as sex, mixed feelings strong enough to hurt but not enough to K*ll. These songs traverse a wide-range of stylistic references, from saccharine Y2K emo and young-dumb-and-full-of pop punk to Soviet fuzz fueled alt and pure Evan Dando-core verse-chorus-verse-chorus-done pop rock. Longtime Narrow Head fans will undoubtedly recognize Duarte’s penchant for huge hooks and burnt-out, depressive emotional landscapes, but with Nihilistic Easyrider, he places the art of songcraft itself front and center.
DELUXE EDITION is a mixtape of sorts, a collection of songs written at various intervals throughout Duarte’s career—the earliest (“Facedown”) began as a joke between Duarte and Narrow Head drummer Carson Wilcox when they were just 19, while the most recent (“Well Kept Secret”) emerged midway through the recording of the record itself. During a brief touring intermission in February 2024, Duarte and Wilcox absconded to Wisconsin for 10 days to track DELUXE EDITION with the engineering assistance of Graham Hunt and Shannon Connor, both of whom can also be heard playing bass and keyboards throughout the LP. Hunt (another recent addition to Run For Cover’s roster) took on the additional role of producing DELUXE EDITION, which Duarte credits as a driving force behind the record’s sonically lush arrangements: “Graham didn’t really change the song structures at all—those were all pretty much set going into recording—but he played a big role in moving the record away from being a straight forward pop punk LP, mostly through encouraging me to experiment with different types of arrangement and layering.”
The touring cycle in support of Narrow Head’s most recent LP, 2023’s Moments of Clarity, has been nothing short of non-stop, including dates alongside such acts as Interpol, Snail Mail, High Vis, Citizen, Basement, Senses Fail, and Saves the Day. Paradoxically, the road wear seems to lend DELUXE EDITION an added warmth and richness, providing a space for Duarte to recenter his songwriting in a more organic and off-the-cuff studio setting, while also finding many of Duarte’s tour companions, including not only Wilcox and Hunt, but also Momma’s Allegra Weingarten and Ella Friedman (who provide additional vocals to the LP), brought into the fold anew. As Duarte puts it, “Narrow Head and this project are equally big parts of me, and I need to do them both, but I always know if a riff is going to become a Narrow Head song or a Nihilistic Easyrider song the moment I first write it. In a funny way, these Nihilistic Easyrider songs are closer to the music I always wanted to make growing up — they’ve got that real ’90s and 2000’s emo feel that I grew up loving and wanting to channel. When I write for Narrow Head I’m writing for what the band needs, whereas these songs are more like, a personal diary of growing up through music.”
In both lyrics and sonic sentimentality, DELUXE EDITION shares much Narrow Head’s affinity for examining the tortured substratum of human emotion. These songs still wade in the messiness of romantic misfires and burnt brain synapses, but from the perspective of the moment when the drudgery and deflated disappointment of real, day-to-day life comes crashing back in— less Hellraiser-level suffering and sexual melodrama, and more Dizzy Up the Girl-tinged bad faith seduction. Hunt’s production smarts help to further bring Duarte’s tales of loneliness, anticipation, and fraying sanity into the richness of real life’s mired complexities, providing a vibrant backing cast of drone-bee synth swells, barroom piano stabs, rattling acoustic guitars, and tribal-tat coded record-scratch aesthetics that subtly nod to both Incubus’s hardest moments and Deftones’ softest.
Leading track “Getaway Plan,” which Duarte wrote during a 2021 stay at a Florida apartment, plunges us straight into the heat of the matter, weaving together a daisy chain of jubilant pop rock hooks before culminating in a Billy Corgan-worthy display of arena-sized guitar theatrics. The lyrics spin a simple tale of botched late night meet-ups and dashed fantasies of suburban escape, evoking feelings of dejection with the charming irreverence of a red Solo Cup littered front lawn. The outer extremes of DELUXE EDITION’s sonic and emotive repertoire are established early on: while second track “Weekend Fever” provides a concise, almost literary dissection of the ennui of empty bars and unanswered texts, this sentimentality quickly evaporates into a burst of tightly wound pop-punk optimism on the follow-up “Facedown,” which trades the former track’s contemplative fatalism for a decidedly more spiteful take on rejection and interpersonal disconnect.
DELUXE EDITION reaches the heights of its romantic saturation on “Well Kept Secret,” blending twin guitar and synth lines with digitally corrupted flourishes into a rich yet unassuming dose of psychedelic-tinged emo pop, over which Duarte ruminates upon one of life’s most dangerous vices: those mutually destructive relationships that you not only can’t seem to quit, but further have no intention of quitting in the first place. The competing presences of Duarte’s Houston hometown and the call (and subsequent comedowns) of road-life are equally felt: whereas some tracks trade in impressions of tequila-soaked desert night drives (“Don’t Get Scared Now”) and sweetly-drawling, mildly-depressive kitsch (“Everything Is So Fucked Up”), others counter with the emotional intensity of dissociative-induced swimming pool drownings (“Sanatorium”) and spiteful interpolations of Champagne Supernova-sized melodrama set to the tune of an increasingly unending numbness to the world (“Waiting on Someone”).
With DELUXE EDITION, Duarte has not stepped away from his preoccupations with Narrow Head, but rather sideways. While still providing us with masterfully crafted and hook-drenched renditions of his trademark neo-emo aesthetics, Nihilistic Easyrider finds Duarte taking up the calling that all great songwriters are asked to meet one day or another, which is to turn inward, and to thus let the small grievances and minor fantasies of an individual persona swell in proportion until they can muster the weight of life’s grandest emotions.
・Listen: open.spotify.com/artist/7kKoxT5gbBKVP3Na9BaQnq
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ON BEING AN ANGEL
On Being an Angel is a rock band from Austin, TX. Their soaring solos and rockin grooves will make you want to roll the windows and turn the volume up.
・Listen: open.spotify.com/artist/5ctOdl10RaUo1PDlmkKCGM
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