Words by Jason Lee.
If you were to take one part Massive Attack’s “Teardrop” and one part TV On The Radio’s “Wolf Like Me” and one part Amon Tobin’s “Red Moon” and heaping tablespoons of GTA 5’s Soulwax-FM in-game radio station and Claude Debussy’s La Cathédrale Engloutie then added a dash of Dead Tooth and Death By Piano for extra seasoning you’d probably end of up with a track that sounds not a damn thing like No Surrender’s “Glimmer”…
…a single that just dropped at midnight but returning to the hypothetical song described above it would most likely have a watery Cancer-sign kinda vibe evocative of the singing embryo floating in amniotic fluid featured in the video for “Teardrop” or the ancient Breton myth evoked in Debussy’s prelude where a mythical cathedral engulfed underwater off the coast of Brittany rises up to the sea’s surface whenever the water’s nearly transparent on clear mornings as the sounds of bells chiming, priests chanting, and a ghostly organ drifts across the sea…
…and this is precisely the kinda vibe we get from “Glimmer” (streamable on all the usual platforms!) which is why we brought any of this up in the first place (duh!) with it’s percolating, crystalline keyboards like lights shining off the surface of an undulating body of water alongside the atmospheric wash of treated guitar playing by Dead Tooth’s Zach James…
…as Darius VanSluytman’s voice floats over the top like a ghostly foghorn with its thick, rounded tones piercing the thick fog blanketing the sea’s surface in the dead of night, its clarion tones emanating from a distant lighthouse with Kalen Lister’s diaphanous vocalizations (from Death By Piano!) harmonizing towards the end like a siren (the Greco-mythological kind, not the cop-car kind!) guiding you to shore…
…and indeed the lyrics seem to be about seeking something or seeking relief from something (“gonna make it all go away”) to where in the end everything is going to be all right as indicated in the song’s final image but first ya gotta navigate some deep, dark waters to find that sunken treasure at the bottom of the sea tho’ far be for us to read anything too specific into the lyrics or paint a hyper-vivid mental image using overly florid language we’ll leave that to the professionals…
…and just in case you wanted to know more about No Surrender’s storied history you should take a look here and if you’ve got time to spare you could also read our past features on Death by Piano and Dead Tooth both of whom being regular collaborators with No Surrender with Kalen even having a full EP in the works with Darius and finally you oughta know that “Gimmer” is the second advance single from No Surrender’s upcoming EP Be Still whose title track came out as a single in June but first we encourage you to read the press release for “Glimmer” reproduced in full below cuz it’s got lots to say too…
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RE: No Surrender – “GLIMMER” – RELEASING 9/27/2024 ON ALL PLATFORMS
“I told the mix engineer I wanted the song to be a duet with the guitars,” Darius VanSluytman of No Surrender said. So fittingly, the shimmering fuzz of Dead Tooth frontman Zach James’ guitar cuts through on “Glimmer,” the latest single from No Surrender. The No Surrender blend of electronica, lo-fi post-punk, and hip-hop drum programming, a style that made them an oddity during the group’s 2010s run is still present. That quirkiness led to nods from SPIN, MTV, Vogue, NME, and Pitchfork in the past.
The tune also features vocal assist from Kalen Lister, lead singer of Brooklyn Dark Wave band Death By Piano (No Surrender did some co-production on that group’s first two releases). “Kalen and I have been friends for over a decade. Zach and I go back many years as well, and we’ve released two joint singles. The song is pretty personal, so it was nice building a shelter for it with people I share a connection with.”
The reclusive musician and spoken word artist has been slowly emerging from self-imposed exile in the past two years. An original suite of ambient music with underground sound artist Pyron was performed at the Asia Society (under Darius’ legal name) in 2023, inspiring him to finish up a number of nearly completed tunes sitting on hard drives.
He returned this year with a dub-inspired remix of “I Said What I Said” by hometown punk heroes, Rebelmatic (their lead singer, Creature, is a former bandmate of Darius’ in another project), and followed it up with the mid-tempo electronica/rock tune “Be Still” in June.
“Glimmer,” is another step towards putting the group back into full gear. While he’s hopeful the original lineup can get back together (members live between NYC, LA and Ibiza these days), he mentions there are a few tunes tracked with one original member. Until then, he says a No Surrender x Death By Piano EP is complete. As is a joint EP with Pyron. So there’s definitely more to come, and still no surrender in sight.
And, finally, a personal message from Darius: “[“Glimmer”] is one of the most personal songs I’ve written. I used to be superstitious about writing about people in my life. Sometimes you watch the ones you love fall apart to get it together. And sometimes watching is all you can do. It’s also the first time someone asked me to write a song for them (and I actually did it). Hope I did them justice.“