Hornet Disaster - Weatherday: Review

Review by Lavender:

Weatherday is the emo and noise pop project of Swedish singer-songwriter Sputnik. The project first received quite a bit of attention online in the months following their 2019 debut Come In, which in the years since has developed a pretty substantial cult following. While Sputnik has remained busy with various collaborations and side projects in that time, Hornet Disaster is the long-awaited sophomore Weatherday album. With a 76-minute runtime spread across 19 tracks, the album gives long-time fans plenty to chew on for however long it takes until Weatherday eventually returns again. 

If you've paid any attention to my TikTok or Twitter, or even came to the release party I hosted for Hornet Disaster last week, then you already know I'm a big Weatherday fan. And in the lead up to this record I became more and more excited with the release of pretty much every song. In one way or another dating all the way back to 2022, 7 songs in total had been released from this record before it dropped and I like most of them a lot. "Radar Ballet" and "Green Tea Seaweed Sea" are songs I've had literal years to fall in love with. The former popped up on a Bandcamp compilation years ago and features shifts between twinkly gentle guitars and blown-out fuzzy riffs that I find infectious. "Green Tea" is an expansive 6-minute cut that was originally supposed to be a B-side left off the album. I'm not sure exactly why Sputnik changed their mind but I'm glad they did because it's a track I've always had a soft spot for and I'm glad it's here. 

Then earlier this year the official singles for the album began with the excellent one-two-punch of "Angel" and "Heartbeats." "Angel" is a song I utterly adored right out of the gate with a hazy veneer of childhood activities in the lyrics. It culminates around the dreamy repetition of "like an angel in the shape of an angel" which makes for such a mesmerizing moment. The B-side "Heartbeats" is another highlight and I particularly love the lyric "out heartbeats in sync, our only real link" which pops up several times. 

Next up was "Tiara" another huge favorite where every single refrain on the song is so infectious and the driving instrumental is so intense throughout. It all builds so well to the screamed hook and I just love everything about it. "Ripped Apart By Hands' was the finale single and by this point I was so excited for the album that I basically went blind but you should know it's also great with an introduction of acoustic guitar and gentler singing with a second half that's every bit as infectious as the other singles. 

So that's most of what we knew going into the record, but a few of my biggest questions remained, like what would be carried over from Come In. With the opener and title track "Hornet Disaster" we get one answer to that question, absolute musical chaos. Even with a shift from lo-fi production quality to a cleaner sound, these mixes are absolutely dizzy with heavily manipulated layers of instrumentation. The opener features wiry guitar leads and crashing drums that erupt out of the fold from the very first moment with a short lyrical refrain that ties right back into the artwork on the album cover.  

"Meanie" is another explosive cut about Sputnik allowing themselves to be meaner and it's a huge highlight through that lyrical lens. It's also a great cut sonically with perfectly anguished singing reminiscent of the of the most dramatic points on Come In and distant thunderous drums that feel like they're ripped from a Parannoul song. The most visceral song on the entire album is the throttling "Blood Online" which again blasts you from its opening note and delivers relentless frenetic energy throughout. The lyrics are full of memorable moments showing off the painful cycles of intense self-sabotage that align with exactly how the song sounds. That culminates in the closer "Heaven Smile" which is even more unpredictable with a random beat drop that actually goes hard as hell coming in out of nowhere which admittedly kicks absolute ass. 

Speaking of surprise instrumental additions, later on the album we have the quietest track of the bunch "Aldehydes." It's a sort of ballad that delivers subtle swaying strings that are completely out of character for anything else on the album. It's such a sweet and touching moment this late into a record that has often been so jagged.  The first taste we get of the album's sweeter side is on "Hug" which starts soft and eventually works its way up with a driving guitar lead. It arrives just in time for these dramatic calls of "you thought you'd feel something by now" as the layers pile on more and more and it's a moment that's stuck with me a lot. 

Occasionally the album serves up a song that deliberately does both, bouncing between the messy chaos and the solemn quiet. "Take Care Of Yourself" has loud emo-style verses with strained vocals that slip into a chorus that's almost lullaby-like with glittery chimes and gentle singing. "Pulka" is the only song on the record entirely in Sputnik's native Swedish and while the lyrics are too vague, especially with translation, for me to pin down exactly what they mean it's a very enjoyable song. The best of these split tracks is "Chopland Sedans" which features some of the clearest and most up-front vocals on the entire record but contrasts it with an absolutely dizzying instrumental that I adore. Then it wraps everything up with a touching little piano outro. 

While I've touched on specific lyrics I like on the record I haven't really gone into much of its overall themes. While there are plenty of instances of what feel like blurry childhood nostalgia and references to various media and anime, at the core of the album is a visceral struggle with experiences like depression and anxiety. A great example of this is "Cooperative Calligraphy" which starts off with a fucking Big Bang Theory sample, and yet it actually does a great job of summing up the record's core themes of anxiety and mental unrest into just a few words. From there the song kind of goes wild diving into dreams and ending on a damaged love affair punctuated by Sputnik's now-signature dreamy repetition. "Agatha's Goldfish" is another song that confronts these feelings directly but also deploys some attention-grabbing metaphors like hiding under a blanket for so long that it fuses to your skin or using up half of all your health and happiness just to get through a single month. 

It's clear by this point that I think Hornet Disaster is a remarkable album, but being the stuffy music critic I am I do have to point out the few things I don't care for on the record. Occasionally some of these songs admittedly feel like they're crossing over REALLY familiar territory, which can be exacerbated if they're querying from other songs that are several years old at this point. The only issue so intense that it makes me not care for some of the songs here is the singing. "Nostalgia Drive Avatar" is an 8-minute cut that first dropped years ago and I've honestly never thought it was all that stunning. The long composition feels like a result of the long quieter instrumental passages which feel extra unnecessary in the face of several songs on this record that forgo them entirely and successfully deliver nonstop intensity from start to finish. It also features some very strange and unfortunate singing at several points, which is also an issue I have with "Blanket." It's a really interesting cut lyrically flipping the idea of a blanket from something comfortable into something colder and more isolating by having it stored in the attic. Unfortunately, the hook features Sputnik basically yelping in a really unpleasant way while in other moments on the song they're singing so quietly they basically disappear. 

Nitpicks aside, Hornet Disaster really is a triumph. Weatherday builds on top of one great single after another to deliver a huge record, celebrating the legacy of their debut and building on top of it. That expansion in sound comes with a honing in on themes that match the sheer anguish and dramatic intensity of the album at both its loudest and softest moments. In the album's true miracle, it manages to increase the quality of the recording, production, and mastering of all the sounds it deploys and yet not a single bit of the frenetic wiry chaos that made Come In so infectious is lost in the process. If anything this album manages to take those ideas to even more challenging and rewarding places. 6 years was a long time to wait, but if Sputnik continues to deliver material this good, they can take as long as they need on a third record. 9/10

For more noisy pop and shoegaze, check out my review of Venturing's (Jane Remover) Ghostholding