Memorials had a few takeaways from their visit to the Yoko Ono: Music Of The Mind retrospective at London’s Tate Modern. “Cut Glass Hammer” was a big one.
“There was a photo of her holding a glass hammer,” says Verity Susman, one half of a duo that also includes Wire guitarist Matthew Simms. “The paradoxical concept amused us, with some distant parallels to our own explorations of memorial waterslides.”
Susman is referring to Memorials’ acclaimed 2024 debut, Memorial Waterslides, a wildly imaginative, melody-driven affair that dips a toe or two in the avant garde. The duo’s upcoming All Clouds Bring Not Rain (out March 27 via Fire) casts an even wider stylistic net, incorporating folk, dub, post-punk, ’60s soul, garage rock and more. For the album’s latest single, Memorials started with two modular synth lines in slightly different time signatures.
“They continually evolve and change as a pair, even though individually, they repeat almost unchanged,” says Susman, who’s also the frontwoman for Brighton-bred indie rockers Electrelane. “That gave us this minimalist, off-kilter center around which to create the rest of the track. With an underlying structure that’s constantly in flux, musical phrases and breaks don’t fall in places you’d expect.”
And yet it all sounds so weirdly accessible.
“It was a sort of challenge to turn this into a pop song that works as something immediate and catchy despite the somewhat unconventional heart that drives it,” says Susman. “There’s a simplicity to the track—and at the same time, if you take it apart, you find it’s built on shifting sands. As we say in the lyrics, ‘Nothing is exactly as it feels.’”
We’re proud to premiere Memorials’ “Cut Glass Hammer.”
—Hobart Rowland
