The First Glass Beach Album (stylized in lowercase) is the debut studio album by Los Angeles-based indie band Glass Beach, which comprises "Classic" J McClendon on vocals, William White on drums, Jonas Newhouse on bass, and Layne Smith on lead guitar. The album was self-released by Glass Beach on 18 May 2019, and re-released on 24 January 2020 upon the band being signed with Run For Cover Records.
The album was worked on for three years, starting from when the band was formed, and the songs in the album went through multiple iterations until they were finished. The album was compared to other artists in the emo genre, as well as punk and chiptune.
Background
Glass Beach was formed when vocalist and band leader "Classic" J McClendon's solo musical project Casio Dad caught the attention of bassist Jonas Newhouse and drummer William White, who moved to Los Angeles to join the band in 2015. The trio began making music together, working on their debut record for three years. The band later recruited lead guitarist Layne Smith to re-record some of McClendon's parts in the album.
Before the band formed, McClendon had already had the idea of making the album's first track, "classic j dies and goes to hell part 1". McClendon claims that the track was one of the first to be started and the last to be finished, saying that "we always wanted to have that song go through a bunch of different sounds and we tried so many different sounds for it." They further claim that the band "roughly had an idea of where most of the songs were going to be from the moment we started writing them". McClendon stated that the band, during the making of the album, was "never trying to make something that a lot of people would like, we were just doing what we wanted to do", while they were fully aware that the album's sound was "weird". McClendon further claims that during the production of the album, "most of the songs would go through literally hundreds of versions".
Music
The first track of the album, "classic j dies and goes to hell part 1", according to Pitchfork's Abby Jones, is "a jazzy opus best described as The Black Parade off Broadway", calling it "the most overblown track" on the album. Paste's Scott Russell describes the song as opening up into "an irresistible prog-pop jam, downshifts into a hushed, horn-accentuated bridge, and then throttles back up into full-on power-punk thrash". Jones called the album a "whirlwind of post-emo maximalism, fusing mid-aughts pop-punk with synthy, sugarcoated chiptune", separating electro-punk tracks like "bedroom community", "dallas" and "yoshi's island" with instrumental ones. bedroom community, according to Jones, is a traditional piano solo split up between parts that Jones compares to video game soundtracks. McClendon describes the core concept of "bedroom community" as "the idea of people themselves being commodities." Ian Cohen of Stereogum interprets the track "bedroom community" as seeing "the human cost in trying to build an online scene in that manner — the influencer who’s emboldened to 'monetize her suffering.'" Jones compares the tenth track, "dallas" with Midwest emo before the track launches into synths. Newhouse describes the sound of the track "yoshi's island" as "this bossa nova song that doesn’t stay bossa nova for very long."