Nihilistic Easyrider (Narrow Head frontman Jacob Duarte) releases his debut album DELUXE EDITION via Run For Cover. Make no mistake, Duarte isn’t going solo. DELUXE EDITION is a mixtape of sorts, a collection of songs written at various intervals throughout Duarte’s 10+ year career.
These songs traverse a wide-range of stylistic references, from saccharine Y2K emo and young-dumb-and-full-of pop-punk to Soviet fuzz fueled alt and pure Evan Dando-core verse-chorus-verse-chorus-done pop rock. Brought to life by a cast of characters including Narrow Head drummer Carson Wilcox, producer Graham Hunt, plus features from Momma’s Allegra Weingarten and Etta Friedman, this debut album still provides with masterfully crafted and hook-drenched renditions of Duarte’s signature songwriting aesthetics.
On the album’s focus track “Well Kept Secret” reaches the heights of DELUXE EDITION’s romantic saturation. Available alongside a third video by director Nate Kahn, the single blends twin guitar and synth lines with digitally corrupted flourishes into a rich yet unassuming dose of psychedelic-tinged emo pop, over which Duarte ruminates upon one of life’s most dangerous vices: those mutually destructive relationships that you not only can’t seem to quit, but further have no intention of quitting in the first place.
With DELUXE EDITION, Nihilistic Easyrider provides us with diaristic vignettes of a life in perpetual motion, offering a more introspective view into the preoccupations of a songwriter whose life revolves around the stage but is ultimately lived elsewhere. Its tracks wade in the messiness of romantic misfires and burnt brain synapses, but from the perspective of the moment when the drudgery and deflated disappointment of real, day-to-day life comes crashing back in. Hunt’s production smarts help to further bring Duarte’s tales of loneliness, anticipation, and fraying sanity into the richness of real life’s mired complexities, providing a vibrant backing cast of drone-bee synth swells, barroom piano stabs, rattling acoustic guitars, and tribal-tat coded record-scratch aesthetics.
