Words by Paige Daniel
In October 2019, I departed the Brooklyn college campus I had started at a month prior to foray into the then-formidable Manhattan, nervously heading to Chelsea Music Hall for a show. I had bought a $13 ticket on Eventbrite to see Greer perform — a price, despite its lowness, I couldn’t convince any of my new peers to spend with me. Yet something within urged me to go alone. It might’ve been a desire to see this niche corner of internet personalities, whose taste I respected, take a shot at music. Or just as likely, I was longing for a touch of California to reach my neo-transplant heart. I missed home — and this band I liked felt like a piece back to it. Settling into the crowd, I welcomed the echoes of California’s indie-rock scene reverberating across the stuffy wooden-floor, but standing amongst the countless other x-marked attendees, I found it didn’t fully-embody the homecoming I’d imagined.
With only two songs released at the time, Greer filled the hour with covers like “Someday” by the Strokes and an impromptu “Happy Birthday” for someone in the crowd. The music was great, but over in a flash — and drowned at times by the crowd’s parasocial interjections and youthful egocentrism. Slipping out early, I propped my phone against a bench at the 14th St/8th Ave station and took a selfie with merch I had been the first to buy, closing the night feeling like there was more to come. For myself, in this new and scary city I’d hightailed across the country for — and more assumptively, for this infant band whose members I believed in.
Six years later, after touring several EPs and singles, solid though searching, Greer feels like they have finally come home with their official debut album, Big Smile. Can you make a return to a sound you’ve only just established?
Filled with two instrumental tracks, a languid piano ballad, retro arcade-style SFX, and raw production elements via screeching amps and fuzzy microphone feedback, Big Smile feels like the result of somber play coming to fruition. Many songs on the album lean into its garage-rock core, with loud, distorted guitar dominating the sound and turns in flow reminiscent of some JEFF the Brotherhood tracks. Yet, chronological listeners will be surprised by the slower, more stripped down songs that pop up in the album’s latter half — “1994,” “Demolition 9,” and “She Knows” continually shifting the tone, while “Audio_77” (audiences’ initial glimpse into the album and the band’s rebrand as a whole) closes the album with melancholy and a quiet assertiveness unlike anything released by Greer before.
The band themselves have cited the album as reflective of the time they spent apart, not making music. As a result, the songs seem to tour through a mix of emotions from its four members, with their lyrics often conveying a sense of yearning through only a semi-sensical gaze — capturing emotions rather than explaining them outright. One of my favorite elements of the album’s lyricism is simply the vocabulary I picked up through listening. Greer seems intentional in their use of abstract, double-meaning terms that might not be familiar to the average listener — like mugwump, a person who remains aloof or independent, especially in politics, or omnibus, which can refer to either a large public vehicle or a book that compiles multiple works.
So while the narrative voice cries “lost” in its verses (several songs on the album directly reference a person leaving), Greer’s sound has never felt more cohesive. They don’t play it safe in their exploration, but don’t stray too far from the unique mold they’ve built for themselves. Guitarist Corbin Jacques even steps up as the main vocalist on several tracks, pushing the sound into new territory that it couldn’t have reached prior with lead singer Josiah’s higher melodic register.More than anything, Greer seems to be having fun with these new songs, ready to leave behind the more somber times they reflect on in the material— and the fun totally works. Just look at the ‘80s retro-kitsch, action-figure-come-to-life music video for “Had Enough” and the human art installation done with Heaven by Marc Jacobs to celebrate the album’s release. As a fan, it’s surreal to see how far the band has come. From that early, intimate show with only two songs to their name, I expect tickets for Big Smile’s upcoming tour will only grow harder to come by as, with its release, it feels like Greer has truly solidified their place in the indie-rock scene.
Loudspeaker Collective 