In a little over two weeks Drop Nineteens will release their first LP in 3 decades. Entitled Hard Light (out November 3rd on Wharf Cat Records), the album has been billed as a spiritual successor to the band’s watershed 1992 LP Delaware, and album that is considered one of the most influential shoegaze records ever released. Today, the band are sharing a final preview of the LP, a track called “The Price Was High.”

When Drop Nineteens disbanded in the mid 90s, Greg Ackell decided he would never make music again. He wouldn’t noodle around on a guitar in the basement. He wouldn’t get a group of friends together just to jam. He was done with music entirely. Following the release of the shoegaze masterpiece Delaware in 1992, and the intricate experimentations on National Coma in 1993, the group disbanded. They had a great run. They shared stages with Radiohead, Hole, Blur, PJ Harvey and Smashing Pumpkins. They went from being teenaged kids in Boston to mid-twenty-somethings with videos on MTV, sessions on the BBC, world tours and numerous festivals under their belt. So when Drop Nineteens ceased to be, Ackell felt content. He had the rest of his life in front of him to figure out what he wanted to do. Music was a closed chapter.

That was until 2021, when a friend from the band’s early days got Greg on the phone to suggest making some music together, just to see how it felt. Instead of shutting it down like he had been doing over the years, he decided to entertain the prospect. For the first time in nearly 30 years, he picked up a guitar with intent. He immediately called up Steve Zimmeran, the band’s bassist and fellow guitarist, and the two got writing. It felt effortless for Ackell, like he never stopped writing music. “We were off to the races,” he says, “But also the question came up: What does a modern Drop Nineteens song sound like?” Enter Hard Light, the band’s stunning third record. To quote Ackell, it’s the band’s proverbial follow up to Delaware, a modern Drop Nineteens record that is completely singular in its sound and vision.

The first task in making Hard Light, was of course, getting the rest of the band back together. Drop Nineteens is an inherently collaborative project. Ackell writes the lyrics, and he works with band members Zimmerman, Paula Kelley, Motohiro Yasue, and Peter Koeplin to create the sonic world. The record came together over the course of a year, recording at a patchwork of studios all around the country: Boston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. When Kelley and Ackell first heard their vocals recorded together on the opus album closer “T”, the chemistry was undeniable. Making music together felt natural, fluid, exciting.

Hard Light is a romantic record in the literary sense. Beauty from longing; longing from beauty. You put the album on and want to be clad in a velvet dress sprawled across a fainting couch. You want to be holding someone’s hand while you sit back in the tall grass. The guitars are expansive and expressive as ever. Ackell and Kelley’s vocals are cool, crystalline, and luminous. “Gal” comes on like a dream. The vocals pour in when you least expect them, once in the middle, where Ackell delivers one of the strangest (and best) lyrics on the record, “And there were snakes/with cats at the wheel.” Hard Light’s first single, “Scapa Flow” is triumphant and an excellent example of what a modern day Drop Nineteens song sounds like. The guitars glide cloud-like, floor toms shuffle and rumble in the background, searching. Ackell and Kelley’s vocals are as toned as they are bound. Hard Light is every bit the ride that Delaware was, diverse in its sounds, with surprises at every turn. Drop Nineteens have brought clarity and cool in 2023 to the genre they helped create. A portrait of a band 30 years later, as talented and dedicated to their craft as ever. To put it more bluntly, they’re at the top of their game.

Pre-order Hard Light HERE.