Naked Giants: Shine Away Tour 2025

When Naked Giants formed in 2014, the Seattle trio—vocalist/guitarist Grant Mullen, bassist/vocalist Gianni Aiello and drummer Henry LaVallee—were all eighteen years old, and full of the reckless, restless energy of youth. A decade on, both they and the world have changed immensely. Shine Away—the band’s third full-length, following on from 2018’s SLUFF and 2020’s The Shadow—is very much an acknowledgement of that. It’s an album that doesn’t just reflect on the personal life and times of the three of them and the world at large, but casts a discerning, self-reflective eye on what it’s like to be in, and be, Naked Giants. It’s the sound of a band coming into, and becoming, themselves. Of course, that’s a never-ending process, but for the first time in their career, Naked Giants are taking stock of their journey—who and what they were, are, and want to be.

“Our first record was still running on fuel from starting the band as 18 year olds with a rock’n’roll dream,” says Mullen. “Since then, life has changed. We all got day jobs or went back to school, and really grew into ourselves individually.  Before, we were anxious to express ourselves in whatever way we could through music. Now, we have more to say, and I think we’ve made a record with more meaning and purpose.”

Despite these personal changes Shine Away contains the same sense of impetuous urgency that defined SLUFF. and the band’s preceding 2016 debut EP, R.I.P., and was still to be found within the fabric of The Shadow’s songs, too. So while the band might be removed from their younger selves, there are still traces of those people in these nine songs.

“I’ve realized that being an effective communicator is such an important part of being a musician,” adds Aiello. “We’re carrying the typical garage-rock ‘throw it at the wall and see what sticks’ ethos with us to this new phase of life. This time around, there’s room in the music (and in ourselves) not only for the young raucous kids we used to be, but also for the fully emotional people we’re becoming – people with hearts that love and break and ache and all that kind of stuff.”

GIRL AND GIRL

In one sense, it’s easy for artists—songwriters, specifically—to express their feelings in their work. After all, that’s what the lyrics are for! But it’s much harder to convey emotional energy in how you play, slash at the guitar, and the structure of the music itself. That’s precisely why Girl and Girl’s Sub Pop debut, Call A Doctor, feels like such a vital, electrifying shock to the senses. Not since the early work of Car Seat Headrest or Conor Oberst’s widescreen emotional brutality as Bright Eyes has indie rock managed to come across as this intimate and grandiose, as the Australian quartet led by Kai James lay a lifetime’s worth of woes—mental health, the human race’s planned obsolescence if you’ve been living on this cursed rock you know what we’re getting at—across a canvas of indie rock that feels both timeless and in-the-moment.