An interview with Horse Jumper of Love

Frontman Dimitri Giannopoulos talks new album 'Disaster Trick', shoegaze vs. slowcore as an influence, building a board out of Amazon Basics pedals, and the secret to making the perfect pizza pie.

Dimitri Giannopoulos writes the kind of lyrics I actually listen out for. That is saying something because I have never been one to learn lyrics, even to favourite songs of mine. But Giannopoulos always holds my attention. As someone who describes himself as a lyrics-first songwriter, Giannopoulos always keeps his vocals prominent in Horse Jumper of Love’s music. And on the band’s new album, Disaster Trick, he is at his best, documenting his splintered concepts and fever dreams so vividly they feel like your own.

Formed in 2013 by Giannopoulos, James Doran and John Margaris, three teenage friends who went to the same Boston high school, Horse Jumper of Love (named after a poorly translated ancient Latin poem) have been quietly building a discography that, in my opinion, is up there with the best run of albums by any artist over the last decade. I say quietly not only because the band is vastly underrated, but because their music is literally quiet most of the time.

The term “slowcore” gets thrown around a lot when it comes to music that is as tortoise-paced and sparsely-arranged as Horse Jumper of Love. I suppose if this was 1994 they’d be sharing bills with Bedhead, Codeine and Red House Painters. And for their last few albums - specifically 2022’s Natural Part and 2023’s Heartbreak Rules - Horse Jumper of Love have been following the very Wikipedia definition of slowcore: “subdued tempos with typically minimalist instrumentation alongside solemn and melancholic lyrical performances.” But with Disaster Trick, all the shoegaze heads out there can celebrate the fact that the trio have gone back to their roots, plugging in and cranking up the distortion like they did with on their 2016 self-titled debut.

The band recently rolled through North America on a tour with DIIV and full body 2, but they’re back on the road next month kicking off a headlining tour in Toronto with the very awesome Teethe supporting.

In the bio it says that you were listening to a lot of Leonard Cohen when you were writing this album. What is it about his songwriting that had such an impact on yours?

Dimtri Giannopoulos: Leonard Cohen has always been someone I've gone back to. I think particularly for this album, I was writing a lot of it right when I got home from a tour in 2022. My partner and I went on a vacation to Greece, this island called Hydra, which is where Leonard Cohen lived and wrote “Suzanne.” I guess I was trying to feel tapped in. We went inside his house that his family apparently still owns over there too. I'm honestly just a big fan. It’s one of those things with him where it's the lyrics first that I really got attached to as a young kid because my dad was playing it. That's why I relate to him so much as a songwriter because it's clear that he's putting his poems to a melody or a song.

Keeping things Canadian, Joni Mitchell also gets a mention in your song “Death Spiral.” What made you name drop her?

Well, Joni Mitchell is another person who has been influential to me because her lyrics are pretty weird and she also plays a lot of weird tunings on acoustic guitar, which was very influential on me when I first started listening to her. So in that sense, yes, she's an influence, musically, but also that lyric is literal, where the person I'm singing about in that song was an actual event that happened. A person was telling me how they were listening to Joni Mitchell on a hike and they got to the top of mountain and saw the two eagles in a death spiral.

Disaster Trick is the most electric album you've put out since maybe the first one. Especially coming off last year's Heartbreak Rules, which was quite stripped down. What made you decide to bring back the nosier side of Horse Jumper of Love?

I guess it’s one of those things where the grass is always greener. When I was playing heavier rock music, I said, “I want to play soft, acoustic music.” And then I started writing soft, acoustic music and I was like, “I really miss just wailing on my guitar.” You know? I think you just get bored every once in a while with what you've been doing, so you want to just cycle through your bag of tricks. And going into this one, I did kind of think before we started recording that we haven't really done a true electric guitar album since the first one and parts of the second one. So I went into wanting to make a rock record, and to see if I still ghad it from my late teens and early 20s.

This seems to come up an awful lot lately, but some bands with noisy guitars tend to clean up their sound as the years go by, often because they become more confident as musicians. Was that the case with you?

Yeah. I mean, I agree with that sentiment for sure. I listened back to that first record and I honestly like it for what it is, but I'm also like, “Damn, I was such a bad singer and bad at playing guitar!” But yes, I totally agree with that. I think as you play more shows and as you keep writing music, you build more confidence in your songwriting. So you want to put the songwriting forward. I was trying to do that for a while, but then I thought for this one, “I feel good about the songs I wrote, but let me try experimenting with making the songs first,” because the songwriting still feels first to me. The lyrics still feel first, but I wanted to see if I could dip back into the distortion and heavy guitars. Also my dad, it's really funny, he just saw us play in Boston on that DIIV tour, and he's always like, “You gotta to start using more distortion! That's when people will start rocking their heads and really get into the songs!” And you know what, he's right. It is more effective in a live setting to have loud rock guitars.

I read that you were also listening to a lot of HUM, which would explain the return to louder guitars too.

Totally. I was listening to a lot of Leonard Cohen, specifically Songs From A Room and HUM’s Downward Is Heavenward. I don't think the album necessarily sounds like HUM, but the heavy guitar stuff is definitely inspired by them. I feel like on that record, HUM has this cool balance of heavy rock guitar that is super-produced, but there's also this great delicacy to it as well. And I think HUM is a huge influence on me because of that, and their lyrics are about, like a spaceship, or something really beautiful.

A lot of people credit HUM as a shoegaze band, which I don’t necessarily agree with. But not too long ago I heard a song from your first album on a shoegaze playlist on Spotify and that really surprised me. Horse Jumper Of Love also get described as slowcore, which makes more sense to me. Do either of those subgenres play any part in shaping your music?

I feel like shoegaze has become a huge blanket statement for music. It's like anything with loud, affected guitars is shoegaze now, but I'm pretty much a shoegaze purist. I think if it doesn't sound like Loveless or fucking Slowdive or whatever it's not shoegaze. I don't consider us a shoegaze band at all. And the slowcore stuff started coming after we recorded the first album. I had never really been super into slowcore besides like Duster and a lot of my friends’ bands who were into Duster, but I remember when we started touring, a lot of people would come up to me and be like, “You guys sound like Codeine.”

Who I recently saw open for Duster.

Yeah. I mean, Codeine's amazing, but at that point I had never heard of them. But through people telling me we sounded like Codeine, I started listening to them and then I became obsessed with them and it kind of became a chicken or the egg situation. So I was influenced by people telling me that we sounded like slowcore. Do you know what I mean? As I started writing more I was becoming more influenced by slowcore because people were putting that label on us. 

Honestly, I think a lot of the slow stuff just came from me listening to folk music and I was really into Chet Baker as a teenager. I always felt he was the slowcore of jazz or something, where a lot of his songs are really long and slow. And I've been really influenced by and him by Leonard Cohen, whose songs are slow.

You recorded the album at Drop of Sun Studios in Asheville, which is responsible for so many of my favourite albums of late: Wednesday, Hotline TNT, MJ Lenderman, Squirrel Flower, Truth Club. What led you to that studio?

I really connected with Alex [Farrar], who produced and engineered the album. We were on tour with MJ Lenderman in February, 2022, and believe it or not, he opened for us, and we became friends with Jake and Karly [Hartzman of the band Wednesday]. Before that we had done some shows with Wednesday as well, so we all just kind of became friends, and then on that MJ Lenderman tour we were doing, Alex Farrar came to our Asheville show, which was at this spot called Static Age. He just came up to me and said, “Hey, I really like your band. You should come check out the studio.” People don’t really come up to you at shows and say stuff like that, but because Jake had recorded with him and said to us, “You should really check out his studio,” I was into it. So we ended up not checking out the studio the next day after the tour because… I don't know, I think we just got like really fucked up the night before and couldn't make it. And then we ended up just talking on the phone, talking about music and we had a great conversation. I felt understood by him musically and that's a huge thing. Sometimes you talk to someone and there's a total disconnect. They don't know what I'm trying to do. But with Alex it was pretty immediate.

That's kind of wild. And rare. I never hear of bands getting approached by an engineer or producer saying, “Hey, I'd love to work with you.”

That's why this whole record felt kind of cosmic to me. The way it all came out, everything felt meant to be. I wouldn't have wanted to record it with anyone else besides Alex. It was great working with him in the studio. He was very chill and fun to hang out with, but also knew when to get into work mode and we ended up recording 17 songs instead of the 11 we had planned. We just had a great workflow.

You could have just told me it was the look of the studio because visually it looks like such a bright and vibrant space. Like a place that would give you inspiration.

It's amazing. We were there for almost two weeks recording this album and it was the first time we've ever done that where we were living in the studio. Before that we would just go to the studio for a day or two, then go on tour for a month, come back, and go in for another two days. It was super disjointed. For this one, I knew I had to totally live in the album while I was making it. So we did and we stayed there for two weeks. There's an apartment upstairs and we’d just wake up and go downstairs and work for nine hours a day and just try to lock in.

That sounds ideal. I can’t imagine every band gets an opportunity like that.

Yeah, because that shit's expensive. We wouldn't have been able to do it if we didn't have the record label backing us. We've done our previous records pretty cheap, but for this one I just kind of wanted to go all out. I wanted to see what would happen and the label believed in me. So yeah, I feel privileged and really lucky that we were able to do that.

Recording in Asheville meant you were able to work with locals like Karly Hartzman and MJ Lenderman. Were they all just hanging around at the time or did you need to call them?

It was probably like five or six days into our studio time and Jake hit me up and said they were having a barbecue at their house. So we finished recording that day and then we just went over and joined them. And when we were in the studio we were just like, “You guys should come by and see what happens.” Because I really like Karly's voice a lot. So initially we went down to Asheville but I wasn't thinking, “I gotta get Karly and Jake to play on this record.” It just happened. Karly started singing on some songs [“Wink,” “Today’s Iconoclast,” “Wait by the Stairs” and “Heavy Metal”] and we just kept going with it to see how it would sound. And I liked every single take she did. I thought her harmonies added a lot of depth to the songs. And the same thing with Jake. He just came over the next day after that and I was like, “Hey, there are these blank spots in some of the songs [“Snow Angel” and “Curtain”] if you want to try to fill something in.” I like having other people play on the record. It feels like welcoming someone into your space and letting them do their thing. And it's nice to listen back to that and hear people I know on the record.

Ella Williams from Squirrel Flower is on the record too on “Snow Angel” and “Lip Reader.” Was that done in Asheville too?

I think she recorded her parts in her bedroom in Chicago. We couldn't get her down to Asheville, but the song she's on, “Lip Reader,” is basically a duet with me and her. And that happened because I did a solo tour with Ella in March 2023. It was right when I had just written that song and I was playing it live in my solo set. And then a couple shows into the tour I said, “Do you want to sing this song with me?” We sang that song together every night for the rest of the tour. So I had to have Ella on the record doing that one.

You moved to New York City earlier this year. How are you finding it compared to Boston?

I moved in February, but I'm in Boston right now visiting my parents before I have to go on tour. I've been in New York for a few months now, but honestly for the amount of time I've been there I've been on tour like 50 percent of it. I live in Bed-Stuy and it's really cool. I like it. Boston's my home. I grew up here, I went to high school here. That's how me and my bandmates met. We all went to the Boston public school system and my parents still live here. My grandparents live here. I love Boston, but it's a terrible place to be a musician. We kind of came up in the DIY scene here, playing house shows all the time. And when we were in our early 20s, we had a lot of friends who were in school in Boston and it seemed like a very vibrant scene. And it was still semi-affordable to live here. But now I pay less money to live in Brooklyn than I did to live in Boston, plus there's more stuff to do and I have more friends there, you know?

Leaving anywhere to live in New York because it's more affordable… I’ve never heard that one before.

I know. And I have a good spot in New York. I know everywhere is not like that, but I've lived in Boston all my life. I might as well just go to New York for a little bit and check it out, especially if I'm going to be paying less money.

So are you guys able to live off the band at this point?

Not really. There's definitely a point where if we were on tour for seven months out of the year, we could probably live off the band. Since I moved to New York I haven't worked a day job for the last four months, mostly because we've been touring so much, which makes the band sustainable. But if I have any kind of pockets of time in the year where we're not touring for a while, then I definitely do have to get a day job and it's usually in the service industry, or working for this guy in Boston who had a guitar pedal company. It was a great job. He was really into the fact that I played in a band and he was really chill about me going on tour. I would go on tour for a month and come back and work for him again. So if there's a lot of touring, we can live off the band, but if there's not, then we're kind of fucked.

Is touring any harder now that you’re sober? How has it been since you stopped drinking?

I think it's the best decision I've ever made. Everyone's journey is different and all, but my life improved immediately after I stopped drinking. I feel way, way better being on tour. My body doesn't feel like it wants to just give up every morning. And I have more energy on tour. I definitely have more anxiety and I've had more freakouts and panic moments without the blanket of alcohol over the entire tour. But I think the longer I'm sober, the more I can figure it out. I feel like I'm on a good path with it right now. If I want this to be a full-time job and have some longevity in the band, I knew the right decision was to stop drinking. Next is cigarettes.

What was it about the line, “You made up some disaster trick” from the song “Wink” that made Disaster Trick the right name for the album? I'm always curious when a line of a song lyric is used for an album title when it’s not the title of a song.

I've always liked that too. And I think that's why I wanted to do it. A great example of that is Siamese Dream. I guess it's kind of like that. Disaster Trick felt like a good concept for the album. It wasn't the original title of the album, but I thought it was a short and catchy title that might catch people's attention. A disaster trick is when you're playing a trick on the world and it just fails and you’ve exposed yourself so it becomes a disaster. That was my concept behind the lyric, but I do want people to get whatever they want out of it.

The other lyric that keeps catching my attention when I listen to the album is “I read it in the Amazon Basics Bible” from “Today’s Iconoclast.” I actually had to look it up because I could see there being one of those available on Amazon. There’s some Basics version of every product. Where did the line come from?

That's where it came from. I think John, who plays bass in my band, was making this joke about how Amazon Basics has a whole line of guitar pedals and how it would be really funny if he got only Amazon Basics pedals for a tour. And then I was thinking, “What the fuck else is available as Amazon Basics?” I thought maybe there's an Amazon Basics Bible, and I did look it up but it doesn't exist. But I thought it would be hilarious if it did exist.

So did he actually buy any of the pedals? Gearheads love to post their pedal boards on Reddit or social media and show them off or get feedback. A lot of them take that stuff so seriously that I think they would lose their minds over something like that.

No, no, he didn’t, but they're really cheap. Like only $30 or $40 bucks. So then I was thinking maybe it's almost worth it to buy all the Amazon Basics pedals and put it on a pedal board because it would be a funny meme or something.

Last thing I wanted to ask was about pizza. I was watching your video for “Poison” the other day, which features you making pizza, and I read that your dad owns a pizza restaurant in Boston, where you filmed the video. It looks like you learned the tricks of the trade too. What is the secret to making a good pizza pie?

I’d say it's just getting the quality ingredients. You can't skimp on ingredients, you have to get the top quality. That's what my dad always taught me. You have to buy the best cheese, make the dough with the best flour, and make the best tomato sauce. That's the secret. Everything else is just secondary to the quality of the ingredients.

Did you ever work at the pizzeria?

Yeah, all my life. My dad opened the shop in 1987 and it's like a true institution in the neighbourhood. My dad is basically a local celebrity where the pizza shop is. I technically started working there after school when I was in ninth grade, and then I worked there up until I moved to New York. But I enjoy it and that's why I do it. Even whenI had another job I would just come to the shop at night and help out for about 15 hours a week.

What is the pizza you make for yourself when you're at your dad's pizza place?

My dad’s a Greek pizza man so I would probably make a pizza with Kalamata olives imported from Greece and fresh garlic. That’s probably it. I guess over here in Boston and the East Coast, they would call it Greek-style pizza, and it's basically a pan pizza. So it's baked in a pan and then for the last 30 seconds, you take it out of the pan and put it directly on the oven brick so it gets pretty crispy. It's pretty different to New York-style or like any kind of thin crust pizza. The crust is pretty thick.

What city has the best pizza that you've tasted?

Honestly, on this past tour with DIIV we had pizza right across the border in Canada in Windsor, Ontario. We were staying with these kids in Windsor, and they were like, “You have to try Windsor-style pizza.” They were saying that when the Sicilian immigrants in Windsor were all first moving there they created their own style of cheese, so it's this specific style of Sicilian cheese that I guess is only made in Windsor. And we got the pizza with pepperoni and it was all chopped up. So it was chopped pepperoni and it was in every bite.

Wow, I've never seen pepperoni on a pizza like that. But that’s a great idea.

Yeah, it was weird. I don't know if it was necessarily the best pizza I’ve ever had, but it was the most different kind of pizza I've had in a long time. And I was really into it.