Tiny Hazard

Tiny Hazard

The Long Way

Ba Da Bing!

Tiny Hazard return with The Long Way, the first release since their 2017 debut LP, Greyland. That album, assembled over an extended period during which they refined their maximalist pop, was an ambitious, nuanced affair that critics described as “a gift that keeps on giving,” lauding the band for having “pulled off the feat of bottling chaos.” For The Long Way, Tiny Hazard reaches a clearing. After completing a tour, the band retreated to a barn in Vermont's Green Mountains for a week of recording. There they found the ideal setting in which to capture singer/composer Alena Spanger’s songs, which had sprung from a renewed focus on subtlety and space. Surrounded by wooded trails and meadows, the band absorbed their environment. Lush arrangements of blanketing keyboards and intricate guitar lines circle and support Spanger’s voice. The vocals on “Don’t Worry” were recorded as a spontaneous stream-of-consciousness at 3am during what Spanger describes as an “insomnia experiment.” Her tracks weren’t meant to be final, but the band opted to keep them; the dreamy, lethargic quality evokes the disoriented daze of the song's ambivalent reassurances. This open-minded spirit was also key to the writing process: though untrained on guitar, Spanger followed her intuition, writing “I’m Not Scared” with the instrument. Back in New York, that spontaneity gave way to a meticulous attention to detail; guitarist Ryan Weiner mixed the EP, carefully sculpting the sounds and finding an alchemy between their earthy origins and ethereal intimations. Employing a change of pace and a...

Tiny Hazard

Greyland

Ba Da Bing!

Greyland, Tiny Hazard’s debut, is a raw, jagged treasure— a testament to the group’s masterful intuition for pop songs in chaos. This jagged, unpredictable, celestial music is filled with terrestrial pain. The Brooklyn-based five piece, who formed when the group met at The New School, is anchored by the vocals of songwriter Alena Spanger. She recorded the vocals in the solitude of her bedroom, carving out a space that allowed her to explore the nuances of her voice. Her songwriting process began with gibberish and stream-of-consciousnessstyle thoughts sung over melodies, eschewing the clumsiness of real words in favor of tone or timbre. Then she focused on the language, a slow process, to “try and get it just right.” Trained in opera, Spanger prefers “voices that are not perfect,” and was moved to explore vocal possibilities when she heard Meredith Monk. Spanger plays keyboards, Ryan Weiner wields a guitar that is often sonically unrecognizable, while Ronald Stockwell’s drumming and Derek Leslie’s bass playing are painterly in softer moments, but drop unexpectedly into immense grooves, while Anthony Jillions colors Spanger’s vocals with synths and occasional effects. The album was produced by Jillions under the creative direction of the group, and recorded in studios and bedrooms, in an organic, all-hands-on-deck fashion. Each song is its own vivid capsule independent from the next, but they unite on Greyland to convey something viscerally human.