In an era where micro-trends vaporize on contact and subgenres dissolve into algorithmic soup, Ira Glass seem almost relieved. Novelty, they insist, is a dead end. “The half-life of a musical trend is getting shorter and shorter,” drummer Landon Kerouac sighed recently. Frontwoman Lise Ivanova was even blunter: “There aren’t real scenes, just friend groups.” For a Chicago post-hardcore band operating in a city once defined by its fractal DIY enclaves, that resignation doubles as permission. Ira Glass aren’t chasing innovation or distinction; they’re building a communal organism—technically a four-piece, spiritually a revolving door—where friends blur into collaborators and collaborators into co-conspirators. Their blistering second EP, joy is no knocking nation, compresses 50 years of post-hardcore lineage into a dense, pummeling 19 minutes that feel less like a thesis and more like an ongoing study group.
Jill Roth’s saxophone is the band’s gravitational anomaly—a shape-shifter that alters the room’s temperature every time it enters. On “fritz all over you,” Roth threads a smoky, loosely melodic line through post-Slint guitar murmurs, turning a tense crawl into a foggy, half-lit reverie. When the band tears into “fd&c red 40,” the sax goes full rupture: skronk, squeal, and feral eruptions puncture a rhythm section flirting with no-wave funk and ’90s screamo before dissolving into a free-improv sprawl topped with spoken-word mutterings. Ira Glass move through DIY punk’s forgotten back rooms—James Chance’s jittery mania, Brainbombs’ clinical ugliness, Ebullition’s emotional severity, sasscore’s flamboyant bite—with the unselfconscious ease of a group flipping through dog-eared notebooks.
It’s this looseness—this refusal to choose one lineage over another—that makes Ira Glass feel uncontainable. “new guy (big softie)” lurches through shrill screams and spasmodic sax flares before landing in quiet harmonics, like the band momentarily exhaling before their next detonation. Much of this elasticity rests on Ivanova’s voice, which mutates from flatspoken confession to serrated skramz shriek without ever losing its emotional thread. On “that’s it/that? that’s all you can say?,” she sounds tormented in three entirely different registers, her delivery tangled in a swirl of queasy tension. When the track unravels into a minute-long wordless noise passage—drums sputtering, guitars shedding feedback—it feels like the crater left by an eruption you somehow watched in slow motion.
Even the EP’s most conventionally structured moments twitch with volatility. “it’s a whole ‘who shot john’ story” broods with post-rock austerity before Ivanova’s screams and Roth’s sax drag it into a headbanging catharsis, the kind of controlled demolition Swans perfected post-reunion. For all its referential DNA, joy is no knocking nation resists nostalgia’s soft focus: it is harsher than ’90s emocore, more rigid than Chicago’s art-rock elders, and scrappier than modern kin like Prostitute and Sprain. Ira Glass occupy a rare middle ground where volatility feels intentional, severity feels playful, and the line between collapse and composition is razor-thin.
“fritz all over you” vaults from hardcore sprint to lullaby hush with such effortless glide that the band’s songcraft becomes almost invisible. That’s the sly trick of Ira Glass: beneath the noise, beneath the chaos, beneath the dense web of references, there’s a precision so sharp you forget it’s there. joy is no knocking nation may only be 19 minutes long, but it feels like the blueprint for a band discovering not who they should be, but how many versions of themselves they’re willing to unleash at once.
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