our second album,

plastic death

, has now been announced and will be releasing january 19th, 2024! you can preorder the digital album, vinyl, CD, and cassette here!

we have also announced a US tour, beginning in march 2024. get your tickets here!

about glass beach

glass beach is a band based out of the Seattle, Washington area. Their first album, “the first glass beach album” was released independently in 2019 and rereleased on Run For Cover records the following year. Their second album, “plastic death” will release on January 19th, 2024.

The band first formed in 2016 when J McClendon, who had been releasing solo music under the name casio dad and was looking for other musicians to form a live band, moved into an apartment in Los Angeles with bassist Jonas Newhouse and drummer William White, who had discovered casio dad on their college radio station and connected with J online. The trio would play a handful of shows around LA while working on developing J’s demos into an album. After years of writing and recording in their apartment and practice space (which was shared with several other bands), using audio equipment borrowed from the warehouse where Jonas and William worked, a drumkit borrowed from a friend, and every bit of spare time they could find, their album, titled “the first glass beach album”, would be released independently to little fanfare outside of their family, friends, and fans of the trio’s previous projects. However, over time word spread of glass beach online, and the record started to develop a cult following as fans praised its scrappy yet adventurous production, its oversized ambition, and its unflinchingly honest depiction of queer life and mental illness as mediated through the internet. Soon enough, a couple of independent record labels took notice, and the band, now with guitarist Layne Smith (who had been initially brought on to play J’s lead guitar parts live but quickly became a core member) would ultimately sign with Run For Cover Records, who rereleased the album in 2020 and sent the band off on their first tour from Los Angeles to Seattle.

glass beach returned from this tour to find the world had turned upside down. The Covid-19 pandemic was spreading fast, and a lockdown was instated, effectively putting the band on pause as J now lived separate from the other three members which made band practices impossible. Unsure of how to proceed, they tried many different experiments pieced together over Zoom calls and Discord, including “1015”, a hyperpop-influenced single about the 2008 recession, “running”, a rock anthem which was commissioned as a prospect for the third Bill and Ted movie but ultimately rejected, two cover songs which had been voted on by the band’s supporters on Patreon, and several ‘live’ concerts that took place in Minecraft and on Twitch streams. Meanwhile, J had begun making ambitious plans for the band’s follow-up record. Having developed a brief obsession with the works of Carl Jung, J wanted to explore what Jung calls the shadow, the hidden side of the self which holds one’s anxieties, repressed desires, and traumas which Jung believed must be welcomed into the conscious mind in order for a person to truly become the most complete version of themself. J was also meticulously studying the structure and composition of much of their favorite experimental music, writing essays and drawing diagrams in their journal, nestled inbetween vivid descriptions of their dreams and nightmares. These writings, combined with demos the band had passed back and forth over Discord, would become the seed for the second album, “plastic death”.

In late 2021, all four members of glass beach as well as J’s partner Daxe (the band’s primary visual artist who had painted most of their album and single art) moved into a house together. Now able to have in person band practices with less covid risk, they began working on their new material in earnest, with a new level of dexterity on their instruments from constant solo practice in isolation. Songs would be jammed out, recorded, tweaked, re-recorded, digitally chopped up and resequenced, all in service of finding a sound more abstract and emotionally resonant than anything they had done before. The band opted not to rent studio time as they felt it important to take their time to figure everything out without the pressure of paying for every hour, and so all of the recording took place in their practice space and house, and was engineered by Layne and J. By the end of 2022, the record had been trimmed down to 13 songs (of the nearly 20 ideas they had been working on) and fully recorded. Layne and J, with input from the rest of the band, mixed the album over the course of the next couple months, and then Will Yip, who had been connected with the band via Run For Cover, mastered the album. In the summer of 2023, with the album fully complete, the band relocated to the Seattle area. On the drive up, J listened to the album multiple times and, always a perfectionist, was dissatisfied with how it sounded, prompting an emergency remix of nearly all the songs. With its drastic dynamic changes and often very dense instrumentation the record had proven very difficult to mix, but by the end of the remix and remaster process the band was satisfied.

The public would first catch wind of the new album in October 2023, when the band began posting cryptic videos on their social media which linked to a bizarre labrynth of hyperlinks on the glass beach website. Fans who went deep down the rabbit hole discovered a hotline which gave out the album name, release date, and tracklist, as well as numerous hidden videos featuring clips of various songs from the new album. Eventually two of the album’s songs, “rare animal” and “the CIA” would be found in full on the website under layers of obfuscation. This ARG (Alternate Reality Game), created by J, was built to set the tone of this new era of glass beach, an intricate, surreal world. the CIA and rare animal were released soon after, the former featuring a music video directed by William and the latter with a lyric video animated by J. “plastic death” will release January 19th, 2024.

booking: glassbeachband@gmail.com

our linktree with all of our social media accounts
(if you're into that kind of thing)

our bandcamp

run for cover's glass beach store, featuring plastic death and tfgba physicals and merch

our store, where we cycle out new designs relatively often

2024 US TOUR! get your tickets here!

the first glass beach album

plastic death

other songs

plastic death arg labrynth

tfgba era website archive