Glow: The New Single by See Plus
With the release of their newest single, Glow, See Plus is ushering in a new era of their sound. The indie rock trio from New Jersey, comprised of Miles Dellaha, Jake Linsalata, and Alex Fiume, just dropped the track on May 17th.
The production of Glow was a shift for the band in and of itself.
“It was the first song [where] we didn’t use a studio,” Miles explains, with Jake joking that the song was produced in “Studio C… as in see… as in Studio See Plus.” Though the production and mixing was an in-house operation, Glow was mastered by the same person who mastered the first Horse Jumper of Love record.
Glow has almost an almost shoegaze-y element to it, but isn’t full on My Bloody Valentine or Slowdive. It takes my favorite element of shoegaze, the driving guitar, and uses it to carry the track forward. The cadence of the guitar has you nodding your head the whole time, and the low vocals help maintain the somber tone of the instrumental while allowing the listener to connect with the emotionality of the track. The backing vocals are perfectly placed throughout the entirety of Glow. They’re subtle enough to really support and round out the main vocals without overpowering them, which is often a hard balance to strike. Here, See Plus does it expertly.
“I have to sing super low, so I can never hear myself,” says Miles when talking about performing Glow live. The recording of the track mimics the live performance so well, with the emotion just as raw.
About halfway into the song, there is a fleeting pause in the instrumental, giving the listener space to let the feeling of the track sit with them before it fully takes over. Think 21 Guns by Green Day when there’s a brief moment before the start of the chorus. Seeing this live is that much more exciting. Everyone looks around in anticipation while the drums, bass, and guitar are suspended, and immediately goes into headbanging once the song picks up again.
Towards the track’s close, the instrumental becomes softer, with the vocals becoming more isolated and higher. Slowly, it morphs into a repeated chorus with stronger backing vocals. This creates such a grand ending, which translates successfully into the live performance. It truly is a track that can hold its own both at a show, and blasting through your headphones.
Stylistically, Glow is different from any prior See Plus release, even the more recent singles such as Awake. Yet, it feels like such a natural progression for the sound of the band.
“I feel like there was a bigger internal shift between Awake and Glow. [Glow] is a little less pop indie rock,” says Miles. “I wrote Awake in 2020. Glow is the first song I wrote since the pandemic that has come out. So we’ve kinda been feeling like we’ve been playing catch up. It was kinda difficult to keep current with what we were writing.”
“[Glow] is a really good indicator of what the album is gonna sound like,” says Jake.
“It wasn’t the first song that we wrote for [the album] or got made for it. It was the easiest one to record, so it was the easiest to set the baseline sound for the album,” Miles adds in.
See Plus has been making music since 2016, with their first EP release coming in 2018. When making music for 8 years, it’s inevitable that a band’s sound will shift and evolve. With Glow and the upcoming album, See Plus is at a place where they stand by their older sound, while still looking forward.
“With production being a more at home operation now, it was easier to accept the old stuff back in,” says Miles. This is evident even in See Plus’s live set, in which they have started to include Broken Legs, a song off of their 2020 EP, Better in Person. Though it isn’t as current, it fits in well with the rest of the set, and is a crowd-favorite.
“It’s not that we don’t like the songs we put out,” says Jake. “We just felt a little juvenile, we made some of those songs when we were 17. This whole album has just been, ‘How do we make music that we’d actually want to listen to ourselves now?’”
That is exactly what the band is doing. There will be two more singles releasing soon, with the next one dropping in June or July. Following the singles, the whole project will be out in the fall, with a coinciding tour. This will be See Plus’s first full length album release, after a series of EPs and singles.
“Going through this entire process, it’s gonna be a thing of having a long form collection of songs that accomplish one, big goal. It’s gonna be very rewarding. We really hope people can tell that we love what we’re doing, and can tell the effort that is going into it,” says Jake.
Glow is out now on all streaming platforms, and the music video is out on Youtube. Miles describes the music video as a compilation of tour footage, and Jake describes the music video as “a lot like paranormal activity or Blair Witch Project. It’s a lot of found footage where no one knows what’s going on.” Either way, it is one to watch.
You can find See Plus on all social media, and their website is www.seeplusband.com.
