GNARCISSISTS – “HI”
A SPILL EXCLUSIVE VIDEO PREMIERE
Brooklyn, NY band Gnarcissists have announced their new EP Paradise Aquarium, due out November 13th. The announcement is accompanied by the release of infectious, muscular lead single “Hi,” a fitting preview of the forthcoming EP. “Written during a period where being in the hospital had become almost routine,” vocalist Mathew Orr explains. “There’s something surreal about being alone in a room full of machines. Kicking smack and life’s biggest irony is only looking forward to morphine or medicine at these visits to keep things stable. The song came out of that strange space between wanting to disappear and wanting to feel something – where even pain can start to feel comforting because at least it proves you are still here.”
Featuring members of Malice K, Pretty Sick, Navy Gangs, and Taraneh, the six piece’s origins begin in a Brooklyn squat in the late 2010s. Since then, the band has played with the likes of Fcukers, The Voidz, OSEES, Gibby Haynes, Sufbort, Viagara Boys, and more. Their new EP was recorded at Sean Lennon’s home studio and produced by Ben Romans Hopcraft.
The writing of Paradise Aquarium was fraught with misfortune: lead singer Matthew Orr was diagnosed with a connective tissue disorder that had hospitalized him after a near fatal accident. This traumatic event found the band strengthening their relationships to one another, leading to a change in direction around the record. Drugs, death, and a changing city impacted their writing process, with the band crafting songs in a more controlled environments, mainly the studio, compared to their previous tendencies to improvise and write on stage.
Paradise Aquarium is about wanting to be loved while feeling increasingly disconnected from the people, places, and body that are supposed to make you feel at home. Written during a period of illness, loss, changing relationships, and a city that seemed increasingly unfamiliar, the songs move between breakup songs, surreal imagery, bodily horror, and moments of almost absurd humor. Rather than telling one linear story, the EP follows the emotional logic of a person trying to understand what it means to be cared for – and what happens when that care disappears.
Across the record, intimacy becomes something both comforting and unsettling: a cup of tea with someone you used to love, being watched from a television screen, being trapped inside a failing body, or becoming an object of someone else’s desire. The mundane and the horrific exist side by side, because sometimes the thing you miss most after everything falls apart isn’t the grand romance or the old life – it’s having someone next to you while nothing happens. Ultimately, the EP is about alienation, loss, and the strange desire to be seen, even when being seen means exposing the ugliest parts of yourself.
Gnarcissists
Paradise Aquarium
(Independent)
Release Date: November 13, 2026
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Background Photo Credit: Jenna Murray
