Alternative pop trio Glass Mansions have released their first EP as an Austin band, Soft Witness, today, June 26. Before they moved to Austin, the band was based in South Carolina. This six-track EP marks their true arrival and is their most personal to date.
The band — vocalist Jayna Doyle, multi-instrumentalist Blake Arambula, and drummer David J. Edwards — draws on cinematic indie pop influences like Metric and Bloc Party, says Doyle, with a sound that leans heavily on the '80s and early aughts.
She explains that many of these songs were written during the lockdown stage of the pandemic, shelved, and later reworked, by which point the material had taken on new weight. Between finishing the songs and recording them, Doyle lost both parents, three weeks apart.
"I think they're more honest than music we've written in the past," says Doyle. "More dialed into our sound."
The EP is sequenced as an arc, opening with the ambition to be an artist and closing with something raw and stripped-down. The opening track, "Sunsetting," establishes the tone: shimmery, EDM-infused pop anchored by raspy, rock-edged vocals.
"Idle Hands," named after the campy '90s horror film, is more discordant and restless. It showcases a writing habit Doyle has developed, putting her own emotional responses to movies and TV into music.
"It’s like weird backward scoring in a way,” says Doyle. “I will watch something and then try to write what it feels like.”
This happens again in the song "Ruin," which was directly inspired by the Black Mirror episode "San Junipero," in which people can upload their consciousness after death to live forever in a simulated world of their choosing, waiting for their loved ones to join them. The characters in this episode have chosen a technicolor 80s world. As such, “Ruin” is synth-driven and nostalgic, and the track loops its central refrain, "so they can't ruin us," as a promise made across that divide.
"The Fool" is the EP's most collaborative song, featuring a rap verse from Austin artist Fak3 5miles (Chance Jackson Hoops), whom Doyle met through a local grant showcase. The song takes aim at industry gatekeeping, featuring an artist who Doyle believes is a victim of this himself.
"It was important for me to [highlight] someone that I think is an incredible artist… [who is] not getting his flowers," Doyle says.
The EP closes with "Mess," its most rock-forward song, built on bluesy guitar and layered vocals that build up to a wall of feedback. Doyle wrote it last, after months of compounding loss: her parents, her job, and even her voice after a bout of laryngitis. She worked all of it in.
"I don't have it figured out. I don't know what I'm doing," she says. "But it's the best mess, the best version, I've been."
Glass Mansions celebrates the release of Soft Witness with a live show June 27 at Hotel Vegas with Subpar Snatch, Wasted, and Fake3 5miles. They’ll follow that up with an appearance at Hot Summer Nights, scheduled for July 16-18, and a regional tour in August.
Soft Witness is available to stream or purchase now. Vinyl records, CDs, and band merch are also available via the band’s online shop.
