Giant Day (Elephant 6 Recording Company) at Meteor Nov 13th / $15 : 8pm doors
On October 10, 2025, The Elephant 6 Recording Company releases Alarm, the second full-length album by Giant Day. Their first, 2024’s Glass Narcissus, bore a unique weight — it wasn’t just a debut album, it was the debut album by the first official Elephant 6 band in more than 15 years. With the 2023 wide-release of the documentary The
Elephant 6 Recording Co. codifying the E6 “sound” for some and introducing it to others, what Giant Day — the duo of Derek Almstead (The Olivia Tremor Control, Elf Power, The Glands, of Montreal) and Emily Growden (Marshmallow Coast, Faster Circuits) — conjured into being on Glass Narcissus was, if not against type, notably darker than the lysergic, sun-drenched pop associated with their former Athens,
Georgia home.
The word “former” is important to Giant Day’s origin story. In 2020, Almstead and Growden moved from Athens to rural Pennsylvania, where they became caretakers of a family farm. They converted the horse stables into a studio and continued to write and record music, but they were dislocated from their sense of the world, let alone
anything resembling a “scene.” That lack of place — what Almstead
and Growden refer to as the “dissonance” between the beauty of their new home and the reality of the world beyond it — crept into their
songs, a desperate signal emanating from off the grid.
On Alarm, that signal is stronger, more urgent. With the momentum of Glass Narcissus at their back, Giant Day returned home from tour and poured themselves into making new music. The alluring, paranoid throb underpinning their songs is keener now, more lived in, as if the veil between the fears of characters whose points of view Almstead had written from on Glass Narcissus and his own had dropped. “It’s thefirst time I’ve ever put out a record that’s concurrent with what’s going on in the world,” he says, “where everything, music and lyrics, has that weight bearing on it.”
Growden’s voice, a glassy siren’s call shimmering on the horizon of Giant Day’s songs, also finds new resonance on Alarm. Her singing remains cool and precise, but as with Almstead, there is less distance between her and the material now, reflecting her expanding role in composing these songs. When Almstead toured with The Ladybug
Transistor in late 2024, she stayed home in Patience, writing lyrics and
melodies in the dead calm of winter — more than imagining isolation, she offers up her own. “I’m proud of it, but it was hell,” she says with a laugh. “Being alone for it took me to a pretty dark place, but it forced me to be confident about the decisions I was making, the direction I
wanted to go.”
The result is unsettling — at turns furious and blissful; danceable, but
in the way where what compels you to dance isn’t joy, but the need to
purge oneself of emotion at the end of the day for the sake of making it through tomorrow. It’s a looser sound, not for lack of craft, but because the frayed nerve they’ve exposed is their own. Growden breathes the opening line of “Devil Dog,” “Is it painless,” with a determined chill, but the deliberate spacing of the phrase, breaking
between “it” and “painless” is a line cracking through a sheet of ice that’s about to break. Instead, her focus snaps around Almstead’s bassline, and it’s as if the two of them are white-knuckling it together through a haunted house on the B-52’s “Planet Claire.”
Horror is a prevailing theme of Alarm: the shock of it in newness, the way one grows numb to it, the brief respite we find from it, and the cycle that results. What Giant Day capture at their poppiest — as on “King of Ghosts,” a propulsive psych-funk raver in which Growden shrugs “I’ve guess you’ve got your reasons” to a rising swell of
apocalyptic images — is very of this moment, the strange way in which
the world feels like it should stop to redress any number of issues but
instead hurtles ceaselessly towards oblivion, “Steady at the wheel / no
distractions.”
In “Golden Times,” Almstead and Growden find shelter in each other,
a glittering soundscape of stacked harmonies, synths that tower into
eternity, and reverb that slows time to a crawl. Like their home in Patience, it’s a bubble, one Almstead and Growden know they can’t occupy forever, and that could burst at any time. What’s so brave about Alarm is that Giant Day break down this fortress themselves,
allowing birdsong to burst through the walls of synthesizer when they’ve turned sour and dystopic, letting a beam of sunlight in when things are at their darkest. “One minute closer to midnight,” Almstead sings on “Good Neighbor,” referring to the ticking of the doomsday clock.
The world is terrifying — existence of the doomsday clock is proof enough of this — but in its last moment Alarm offers up something more than paranoia as a response: “Call if you need anything.” What ends up breaking on Alarm is not ice, but spiritual winter — there is something green, something verdant, something hopeful in that final
note, however unwritten the future beyond it is. One aches to hear
something so tender. Almstead and Growden ache in finding it. But that ache is like a muscle knitting more tightly together, growing stronger, more resilient — something will survive into the future, no matter how hostile that future is.
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