Most bands don’t make it. When the world shut down months after Seattle indie rockers Great Grandpa released their 2019 album Four of Arrows — a big step forward from their debut that merged considered songcraft with sugary riffs — it seemed like an ominous sign for a still-rising young band. When lead singer Al Menne released his first solo album, 2023’s quietly devastating Freak Accident, there was even more reason to think the group may have just quietly disbanded.
Instead, Great Grandpa has returned with their career statement. Patience, Moonbeam, their first album in over five years, isn’t just their most fully-realized piece of work (though it’s also that), it’s also a genuine band record: All five bandmates contribute lyrics; multi-instrumentalist Pat Goodwin provides serpentine song structures; singer Al Menne offers devastating vocal phrasing; guitarist Dylan Hanwright brings the crunch-guitar earworm riffs; bassist and lyricist Caroline Goodwin provides the rhythmic and emotional backbone of album-closing “Kid.” There are even songs, like “Junior,” where Cam LaFlam’s instinctual (and expertly mic’d) drumming takes center stage as a lead instrument.
Patience, Moonbeam is a sonically surprising and structurally unconventional indie rock record. The album feels like the result of a quintet taking a step back — from themselves, their past, and the supposed overlapping genres like indie rock or grunge they belong to — and saying, there must be a new way to do this. The quintet collides influences — flourishes of glitchy industrial electronic flourishes, lonesome country-western instrumentation, ornate chamber pop — and tinker with all sorts of pop-rock conventions. Many of the album’s earworm refrains (and there are many of them), don’t arrive until what is essentially an extended outro (see “Kiss the Dice” and “Doom”). Some songs slowly build into a boil; Others simply simmer. “Kid,” the devastating album closer that details something like a miscarriage, begins and ends with a processed a capella vocal before embarking on a multi-part sonic journey that conjures Sgt. Pepper’s “A Day in the Life.”
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A few songs, like “Top Gun” bear the stripped-down, more straightforwardly rootsy influence of Al Menne’s solo work. But as a vocalist, Menne is more expressive and affecting than ever, alternating from whisper to croon to mid-range belting from one song to the next. And the lyrics he sings alternate from the forthright (“Task”), to the playfully surreal (see “Ladybug,” which namechecks Dr. Bronner’s, Michelle Duggar, Donald Glover’s GQ cover, and the Beatles’ “The End”).
Hidden in plain sight, amidst the off-kilter impressionism and untraditional arrangements, is the band’s innate sense of melody. It’s that sense that turns a nonsense six-word refrain like “it’s closer when I see you, damn” (a line the band repeats five times), into something profound on “Emma.” And it’s that sense that makes Patience, Moonbeam not just one of the most forward-thinking indie rock records of the year, but the most fun to sing along to.