Cherry Glazerr Leap Forward on “Told You I’d Be With the Guys”

The first single from Cherry Glazerr since signing to Secretly Canadian unwinds like the Los Angeles fuzz-pop trio’s career arc so far. When the band debuted in 2014 with Haxel Princess, it received the flurry of local media attention you’d expect for a band fronted by a student from a posh high school and named after an area radio personality. But the music itself was tunefully off-kilter scuzz on the cult Orange County label Burger Records, and the lyrical perspective was wryly thoughtful. Cherry Glazerr’s follow-up single for Suicide Squeeze records, the swaggering “Had Ten Dollaz,” only reinforced the impression that this was a band with room to grow, not some faddish vanity project. 

“Told You I’d Be With the Guys,” Cherry Glazerr’s latest, feels like a massive step forward. Clementine Creevy’s distinctive yowl is clearly foregrounded, which only brings her cryptic social observations into focus: She has said the song was born out of a yearning for female solidarity rather than being, as she sings here, “a lone wolf.” The arrangement is more forceful than ever, built around little more than rickety guitar riffs, Sasami Ashworth’s squelchy keys, and Tabor Allen’s pounding drums. (They’re both new members.) It’s all tautly patient, skulking around more like a velociraptor than a pack of canines. When this beast finally attacks, after a carnival-like guitar solo, with all instruments blaring and Creevy belting out, “Now I see the beauty/ It’s necessary to give a lady a love,” it’s as wonderful and strange as the sight of that Target-uniformed army of zombie males in the video—and Creevy rising above them.

Comments are closed.