Listening to wet glass feels like moving without fully arriving, like cruising a rain-dark highway while your thoughts drift somewhere just beyond the headlights. Verity Den’s second album is steeped in motion—bridges overhead, towns passed without stopping, voices overheard rather than addressed. The songs unfold in the half-conscious space where memory, travel, and imagination blur together. “Someone’s always running on the bridge I’m driving under,” Mike Wallace sings, capturing the album’s restless vantage point: always near something meaningful, never quite inside it.
Where Verity Den’s 2024 self-titled debut leaned on scrappy, lo-fi immediacy, wet glass widens the frame. The production is clearer but colder, giving the band’s familiar textures room to breathe and drift apart. Songs feel suspended in open air, with elements slowly circling one another rather than snapping into place. On “spit red,” the drums swell gradually, like sound pulled backward through space, while “vacant lot” lets Casey Proctor’s soft, fogged-over vocals dissolve into sheets of guitar feedback. The seven-minute “push down hard / tess II” moves with a submerged patience, Proctor’s acoustic strumming and voice acting as a fragile surface tension while Wallace’s talk-sung lines cut through at odd angles.
The distance in the mix is key. Vocals rarely feel close; they sound like they’re bleeding through walls or traveling down a long wire. Proctor’s melodies—often compared to Hope Sandoval’s for their warmth and restraint—carry a weary tenderness, especially on “sympathizer,” where she sighs, “Late party, wish I was home,” without ever fully committing to resignation. Wallace’s delivery works in contrast, half-spoken and slightly askew, grounding the songs in uneasy observation. Their voices don’t compete so much as orbit each other, reinforcing the album’s sense of emotional displacement.
Lyrically, wet glass is sparse, even evasive. Lines repeat, blur, or appear briefly before slipping away, allowing the music to reshape their meaning each time they surface. On “to trees,” the penultimate track, Proctor’s voice is nearly naked against a wandering acoustic guitar and ambient hum, repeating “You belong to trees” like a thought she’s testing rather than asserting. The phrase “unsolved mystery” drifts in and out of focus until it finally clears at the song’s end, landing softly instead of triumphantly. Resolution, here, is quiet and provisional.
The band’s influences hover without overpowering. You can hear Yo La Tengo’s shadow in the distortion-heavy calm of “vacant lot” and in the title track’s slow-building churn, where thick guitar tones feel both comforting and claustrophobic, like a heater rattling through winter. Elsewhere, Verity Den push against the gentler expectations of dream-pop and shoegaze. “spit red” pairs bright basslines and clipped drums with Wallace’s anxious, observational lyrics, while “green drag” breaks into jangly, sunlit momentum—the album’s closest thing to release—without fully abandoning its inward pull.
wet glass doesn’t rush toward clarity. Its power lies in wandering, in letting moments of certainty flash briefly before dissolving back into haze. Verity Den trust the listener to stay with them through the uncertainty, to enjoy the ride even when the destination remains unclear. In that way, the album mirrors its own imagery: rain-streaked windows, blurred signs, and the quiet assurance that movement itself can be enough.
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