wet glass

Listening to wet glass feels like riding shotgun on a long, winding drive down a rain-slick highway before dawn. But wherever Verity Den are headed on their second album, their narrators usually have their heads somewhere else. “Last night they were singing about West Virginia in Boston,” co-lead vocalist Mike Wallace shouts into the anonymous night sky. “Someone’s always running on the bridge I’m driving under.” These 10 tracks exist between locations, coming together like fragments of a dream you’re trying to pin down while still in sleep’s shallow end. But don’t mistake Verity Den’s liminality for stagnation—their subconscious is anything but inactive, and it stirs with as much lucidity and nerve as any waking mind.

Verity Den’s 2024 self-titled debut was mostly built from scrappy, lo-fi demos. The relative clarity of its follow-up lends their homespun sound a new sense of intimacy and unpredictability. The production takes on a wintry vastness, creating greater expanses for the disparate elements of each song to travel. The drum crescendo on “spit red” builds like a reverse-echo, growing closer and more defined; on “vacant lot,” Casey Proctor’s pillowy vocals coalesce with reverberating guitar feedback like fog gathering on a windshield. Subaquatic seven-minute centerpiece “push down hard / tess II” sounds like what Proctor describes in its lyrics—“Soul inside the swimming pool/Shining bright just to mess with you”—as her voice and the gentle acoustic strumming provide surface tension.

Wallace’s talk-singing is a dissonant complement to Proctor’s Hope Sandoval-like melodies. The mix tends to keep their voices at a distance, as though you’re meant to hear them from the next room or through a roadside pay phone. “Late party, wish I was home,” Proctor sighs on “sympathizer,” emerging from slumber on gleaming, squeaky guitars. You can feel her exhaustion, but she doesn’t sound weighed down by it. “Do. You. Sympathize?” she sings, her delivery unexpectedly emphatic in its monotone and even more alluring when she trails off and lets a wiry guitar tangle fill in the rest for her.

The sparse lyrics throughout wet glass leave room for mutability. It’s a record of few words, tumbling through the dreamlike arrangements and reshaped by their melodies. Penultimate track “to trees” sounds raw and improvisational, almost unfinished. It leaves Proctor’s voice unadorned with just a meandering acoustic guitar and ambient background hum: “You belong to trees/Deep below two trees.” The single repeated line of “unsolved mystery” is at first unintelligible under a humming drone, fuzzy ticking, and softly rumbling keys until it floats to the surface like a message in a bottle at the track’s conclusion: “You’ve got it now,” Proctor sings, perhaps a reference to one of Verity Den’s biggest influences, Yo La Tengo. You can hear the Hoboken band’s DNA in the dusky opener “vacant lot,” with its storm of distortion; and in the title track that follows, its thick, flinty guitar riffs feel like a fleece blanket and the hissing and clanging of a radiator on a winter morning. Both comforting and tense, it weaves pop melodies into a loose, spiraling jam that could probably sustain itself for twice the song’s runtime given a particularly raucous live rendition.

Compared to the sleepier strains of dream-pop and shoegaze, Verity Den let their lucid dreams run rampant. Their best hooks glint through the fog of sinuous, loud-and-quiet chord progressions, shaking up extended jams even if just for a shining moment. Bright basslines and tinny drums on “spit red” push against Wallace’s whisper-shouted wallflower observations about “barn-sour” horses and his ambivalence toward the party he’s attending, as he ponders the alienating effects of life on the road. “I hear something breaking off in the distance,” he remarks. “Maybe it’s just thunder.” “green drag” is the record’s brightest spot, a piece of ride-into-the-sunset jangle-pop. “Nothing but laughter from the stands,” Wallace promises in his victory-speech verses while Proctor’s voice flits through hazy, honeyed choruses. wet glass’s meandering is what makes its compact moments of certainty so glorious. Even when you don’t know where their jamming will lead, it’s more than enough to be along for the ride.