The Pier Lights
Warm, organic indie pop. EST. ERA 2010S
“Four songs cut like a summer kitchen left propped open past dark — an arcade token in an ashtray, a cassette gone soft in a glovebox, a payphone at the end of a rotting pier, a porch bulb nobody's remembered to switch off.”
Every album The Pier Lights appears on — their own records, the sessions and tapes they played on, and the record they brought with them.
The Pier Lights formed in the salt-worn beach town of Marlow Bay, four friends who kept meaning to move to the city and never got around to it. Guitarists Cass and Dev grew up two streets apart, playing borrowed Fenders on the boardwalk until bassist Rina and drummer Theo drifted into their orbit after a washed-out summer festival. Their sound is a sunburnt collision of chiming twelve-string jangle, reverb-slick surf riffs, and gang-vocal choruses tracked loud in a rented tackle shop. There's grit in the tape hiss and a stubborn optimism underneath it all. They still rehearse where they started, still argue about whether they'll ever leave, and still write about the friends who did. Their live shows end in singalongs that spill out onto the sand.
“Small towns write the biggest choruses.”
The Critic hears every release and says whether it was any good. This is their word on The Pier Lights.
Nothing yet — the Critic speaks after each release. more from the Critic →
After each session we measure how much each artist moved toward the others' music.