Weatherday – Hornet Disaster | Album Review
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Topshelf Records
One of my many quirks as a music listener is my obsession with Album Of The Year. For those unfamiliar, it’s essentially Letterboxd for music where users can log and rank whatever they’re listening to. Since its inception, the website has become synonymous with music nerds and Fantano worshippers, as only a fanatic would go out of their way to log something on a site that looks so objectively archaic. I make this sound like it's a bad thing, but the website has helped me discover tons of genres and artists that I never would have known about otherwise, including DIY artist and songwriting extraordinaire Weatherday.
There’s hardly much known about Swedish songwriter Sputnik, and their music is, by all accounts, considered inaccessible to most popular music listeners. However, I think that answers the question of how they got so popular right there. The production is unpolished to the point where it feels like you hear the buzzing of hornets, the mess of the world around them. In this case, what keeps “unpolished” from turning into “bad” is the heart at the center of each of these songs. Polishing your heart too much can sand off the ability to actually use it and feel it, and boy, does Weatherday use their heart in this record.
It’s been almost six years since Weatherday’s debut full-length, Come In, which brought many of Sputnik’s character creations (including cover art icon Agatha) into a vast musical landscape of blazing guitars and drums. Since then, Weatherday has teamed up with Asian Glow for a split EP in 2022 and embarked on multiple tours throughout the USA with the likes of Michael Cera Palin, Newgrounds Death Rugby, Oolong, and countless other DIY acts. In the course of this process, Sputnik wrote over 70 new tracks and ended up using a mere 19 of them to construct Hornet Disaster, a 76-minute musical odyssey filled to the brim with an expansion of sounds while staying true to the DIY nature of their artistic process.
There was a moment during the creation of the record where Sputnik knew that “The album was going to be about hornets… It just made sense to me.” You can hear those hornets straight from the titular opening track, where it takes three seconds for you to get slammed with high-pitched guitars and fast-moving drums before the track bursts into a guitar solo. “Hornet Disaster” feels like the type of music you would hear over the speakers of a dive bar, but on a more intelligible level. It’s a fantastic way to start the album and far from the only moment where the hornet motif makes an appearance.
The first leg of this album is quite compact, breezing through the first four songs in less than ten minutes. After the opener, we get more lead-guitar-focused punk sounds with “Meanie,” a track that has Sputnik screaming “HARDER” and “MEANER” as if they have to feel everything before they feel anything. There’s a change into a more delightful Midwest emo type of track with lead single “Angel,” including the hilarious line “like an angel in the shape of an angel,” which has been stuck in my head since I first heard it. The opening few seconds of “Take Care of Yourself (Paper-Like Nests)” offer two firsts on the album: a moment of reprieve from the buzz of cranked-up guitars and a line in Swedish translating to “I’ve always taken care of myself.” It doesn’t last too long, as it immediately blasts back into emo rock sounds and lyrics in English, with the harrowing titular lyric, “When you say things like ‘What the hell’ / what I hear is ‘Take care of yourself.’”
At this point in the tracklist, something I’ve noticed is that all of the subdued moments at the beginning of tracks almost immediately give way to something more explosive, which takes away from some of the potential shock and awe of the instrumentation. However, for “Hug,” a track tackling themes of fulfillment in life and the pain accompanying that lack of fulfillment, it feels more like a gradual build than a complete switch. The musical catalyst is dramatic yet potent, “You thought that you’d feel something by now,” Sputnik repeats, eventually giving way to animalistic screaming, transforming a track that starts as an embrace into a suffocating bear hug.
For all of the pulsing energy within this album, there are quite a few moments of calm, mainly towards the back end of the record. The track “Heartbeats,” which served as the second single, is the most lowkey song on the record to this point and the closest you get to a ballad, with plucky guitars and little claps accentuating the end of the verses. It’s whatever the Weatherday equivalent of a pure love song is. Then there’s “Aldehydes,” which kicks off with spiky guitars and static in the background before transforming into a washed-out section with beautiful strings. That track is a much-needed change of pace from the electricity shooting out from “Nostalgia Drive Avatar” minutes before.
There are some moments throughout Hornet Disaster that are downright violent, most pertaining to the symbol of blood. Take the aptly named “Blood Online.” At first glance, the song is structurally akin to what you would hear on a typical verse/chorus/verse track, however, during the bridge, the lyrics shift into a nightmarish depiction of Sputnik typing on their phone with blood on their fingers and an overdriven guitar blaring through the speakers. There’s also “Chopland Sedans,” with multiple references to the idea of disaster and even more mentions of blood, along with a depiction of Sputnik cutting their lips with a knife.
Weatherday weaves together multiple motifs throughout the gargantuan hour and fifteen-minute runtime, which helps everything come together lyrically. Circling back to the title, hornets are found throughout the record in cuts such as “Tiara” and “Blanket.” There’s also the idea of speaking in cursive, which is mainly detailed in “Blanket,” but it also arises in “Chopland Sedans” and “Cooperative Calligraphy.” The motifs end up creating a narrative and structure towards this otherwise sprawling record, condensing some of the core themes into singular words to make the listening experience more unified.
Towards the back end of the record, Weatherday invites listeners into multi-phased journeys that feel less like songs and more like a traditional three-act film script. The track “Nostalgia Drive Avatar” feels like looking back on a slideshow of film photos you took and watching your life flash before your eyes, with lyrics about Sputnik reliving the life that isn’t theirs anymore (“Could it be nostalgia or am I just fond of my memories” really got me good.) There’s also “Agatha’s Goldfish (Sparkling Water),” with an engaging instrumental passage towards the middle of the song and receding vocals that fake out the listener before slamming back in with the chorus.
Other highlights include “Green Tea Seaweed Sea,” one of the more cinematic cuts on the album, which kicks off with a slower acoustic guitar portion and introduces a beautiful flute before once again breaking it all down. The track “Pulka” sees a massive switch in the Weatherday formula, as the track is entirely in Swedish, with lyrics translating to a depiction of a sleigh ride and the joys of Swedish winter. “Pulka” feels integral to Sputnik’s identity, specifically their childhood, considering how passionate this song feels compared to even the other boisterous tracks. There’s also the final track on the album, “Heaven Smile,” which ditches the guitars entirely in favor of an electronic focus that eventually turns into a chaotic reprise of “Ripped Apart By Hands.”
While Hornet Disaster plays to its strengths with emo-centric guitars and lyrics, there are quite a few moments where Sputnik switches up the formula in some way, and most of the time, they succeed in their experimentation. To some, this record may seem like a product of reckless abandon or a collection of swings from a DIY artist. However, upon closer inspection, listeners find calls of a dreamer who finally possesses the words to express their emotions without purely hiding behind fictional characters. It’s hard to deny the growth and ambition within Weatherday’s newest venture, and it’s even more fun when you embrace the world they have created.
Samuel Leon is a writer, photographer, and overall average Brooklynite. They love to cook one pan recipes and photograph performances of all shapes and sizes. Hit them up at @sleonpics on Instagram if you want cool pictures or have any good recipes/music recommendations you would like to share.
