COLD GAWD • I'll Drown On This Earth • LP

Dais Records

The Southern California shoegaze group Cold Gawd returns to Dais with their second and best suite of crushing downer-bliss yet:
"I'll Drown On This Earth". From the defiant scream that opens the first track "Gorgeous," the album embodies what singer and main songwriter Matthew Wainwright describes as a "go for it" mode: holding nothing back, wasting no time.

Although most of the songs were written in 2022, the recording sessions weren't booked until March 2024, allowing plenty of time to refine and distill the hooks, heaviness, and haze of the music.
The result is a perfect storm of distortion and dream-pop, torn love songs laid into dizzying walls of sound.
Recorded at Paradise Recorders in Anaheim, California, with Colin Knight (of the post-punk band Object of Affection), Wainwright handled the strings while Cameron Fonacier played the drums. The process was efficient and effective, honed by years of performance. Songs like "Portland", "All My Life, My Heart Has Yearned For A Thing I Cannot Name," and "Malibu Beach House" sound dynamic and deeply ingrained in the musicians' beings. Wainwright's lyrics were written just a week before recording. Moods of surrealism, infatuation, and melancholy flicker and fade in a haze of memory and reverb.

As with 2022's "God Get Me The Fuck Out Of Here," Cold Gawd's contemporary vision of shoegaze manifests in fascinating ways in moments like the muted, swirling dreaminess of "Tappan" or the hazy, dragging downtempo of "Nudism" (with a majestic piano outro). Their muse is as alive as it is varied, ranging from My Bloody Valentine's "Loveless" to Drake, post-hardcore, and Beach House. "I'll Drown On This Earth" impressively expands Cold Gawd's canon, dense with riffs and transcendence, escape and revelation, channeled through stacked amplifiers and hidden forces: "Give praise / to whatever / I got time for / hallelujah."