Seattle-based duo glass egg is the project of songwriter/musician Emilia Glaser and collaborator Julian Stefanzick. The duo met in college back in 2017 and quickly became friends; two years later, Glaser would bring in Stefanzick to play bass for glass egg, which was their existing solo performance project. Though evoking the ethereal, intensely emotive tones of bands like Beach House and Weyes Blood, glass egg is in a space all their own, amalgamating dream pop, shoegaze, and freak folk. “Choke” the duo’s gorgeous debut single, is about “breaking free from someone who is destructive, accompanying self-doubt, and the reconstruction of self post fracture.” In addition to this description, Glaser also explained to us the intimate details of the track’s composition:
I wrote this song while processing a really difficult friendship ending and realizing the prolonged conscious and subconscious effects it had on my mental health and other relationships. Writing this song helped me wade through a lot of trauma and resentment, and everytime we play it live I ground myself a little more in my own self assurance.
Recorded in Olympia, Washington in a one-room cabin at the beach, “Choke” similarly houses a gorgeous immediacy that I can only hear as a perfectly controlled volatility, the sonic equivalent of affect and intensity. Glaser’s vocals have an ethereal, spectre-like cadence that floats seamlessly within the already expansive ether of the instrumentals, relaying a narrative of self-awareness, pain, and frustration about attempting to put yourself back together again after being emotionally disassembled by another. What remains is an ongoing reconciliation between contrasting modes of feeling – ache and resilience – but with time, all will ultimately gesture towards the latter: “I feel all of the words I can’t speak, forming,” Glaser admits, “Now that I can finally breathe again.”
“Choke” is out now.
P
photo courtesy of artist
kid with a vinyl 