Elephant 6
On October 10, 2025, The Elephant 6 Recording Company releases Alarm, the second full-length album by Giant Day. Their first, 2024's Glass Narcissus, bore a unique weight -- it wasn't just a debut album, it was the debut album by the first official Elephant 6 band in more than 15 years. With the 2023 wide-release of the documentary The Elephant 6 Recording Co. codifying the E6 "sound" for some and introducing it to others, what Giant Day -- the duo of Derek Almstead (The Olivia Tremor Control, Elf Power, The Glands, of Montreal) and Emily Growden (Marshmallow Coast, Faster Circuits) -- conjured into being on Glass Narcissus was, if not against type, notably darker than the lysergic, sun-drenched pop associated with their former Athens, Georgia home.
The word "former" is important to Giant Day's origin story. In 2020, Almstead and Growden moved from Athens to rural Pennsylvania, where they became caretakers of a family farm. They converted the horse stables into a studio and continued to write and record music, but they were dislocated from their sense of the world, let alone anything resembling a "scene." That lack of place -- what Almstead and Growden refer to as the "dissonance" between the beauty of their new home and the reality of the world beyond it -- crept into their songs, a desperate signal emanating from off the grid.
On Alarm, that signal is stronger, more urgent. With the momentum of Glass Narcissus at their back, Giant Day returned home from tour and poured themselves into making new music. The alluring, paranoid throb underpinning their songs is keener now, more lived in, as if the veil between the fears of characters whose points of view Almstead had written from on Glass Narcissus and his own had dropped. "It's the first time I've ever put out a record that's concurrent with what's going on in the world," he says, "where everything, music and lyrics, has that weight bearing on it."
Track Listing
Out Of Hand Golden Times Without Warning Healthy Families Virginia Paoli King Of Ghosts Back To The Corner Spite 28 Think Carefully Devil Dog Scowl At Me New Hollow My Warm Smile Good Neighbor
