With Moments of Clarity, Narrow Head aren't done expanding their sound
A Texas temperature drop is an objectionable, unreasonable thing, like a sailboat falling from the clouds. This is a very goofy thought, but it’s what breezes into my Midwestern mind as wind becomes gust and Jacob Duarte’s teeth gently start to chatter — sudden signs of an arctic front beginning its December descent upon Austin. However apropos it might be to allow whipping gales to tear chunks from my sound file (this is, after all, an ear-crunching alt-rock band fond primarily of distortion — frequently violent, sometimes swooning and romantic, always heaving forward with shrouded purple weight), it’s not my intention to add an additional milestone to the Dallas group’s first-ever in-person interview by conducting it in a bomb fucking cyclone.
That Narrow Head are clearly still on the come-up is, from my vantage, a fact no less objectionable or unreasonable than the weather. Ever since high school, upon discovering their 2016 debut album, Satisfaction, and accompanying 2014 demo EP on a message board, the band have been a central fulcrum of my sanity-maintaining, angst-rock diet. There was never a grindcore band so savage they couldn’t share space with Narrow Head’s drop-tuned riffs on my cross-country playlists. At the same time, their songwriting (which is pop savvy, but always with room for jammed-out, rock star embellishments) tapped into more than one-dimensional fury, with tracks that leveraged that heaviness toward complex emotions, as a sort of elegantly applied, alt-metal ethos. Key to that was Duarte’s softly echoing, abstract smear of a voice, which drew from the same damp well of dejection — and with as much freak personality — as my favorite emo bands, but never so deeply as to extract mopey, distracting melodrama.
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It’s music one could stage-flip as well as stargaze to, and I’d wager that gap-filling function holds true for the crowds filling their shows: kids with flannel skate shirts at the bottom of their closets, keys on carabiners around their belt loops, and, like Narrow Head, a self-identity forged in hardcore but a listening taste that strays outside it. I’m sure some of those fans recognize and revere the same influences the band plug their pedalboard into: the dreamy, moon-to-tide ebb of Hum, Quicksand’s twitchy burnout rhythms, and sparkle fire solos straight from Billy Corgan’s fretboard. Whether or not in brewing them together Narrow Head are ultimately as musically unique seems beside the point, at least to me. We can’t all be generational innovators. The strength of their workmanship and clear depth of feeling makes Narrow Head a band not so much to be imitated as aspired to — a hardcore-to-alt-rock foundation that’s given us recent upstarts like ASKYSOBLACK and Soul Blind.
[Photo by Nate Kahn]
“It’s a classic sort of life path: start a bunch of hardcore bands and then grow up and move on to something more broadly impactful,” Duarte says, before adding a hope some might cast doubt on. “I would like to be identified as a rock band of the 2020s, like Nirvana is a rock band of the 1990s.”
Duarte and I are both angled to leap from our picnic table and seek shelter within the Yellow Jacket Social Club (cool bar, rustic insides, not nearly as bougie as the name suggests) the moment we spot his straggling bandmates: guitarist William Menjivar and drummer Carson Wilcox. But as Duarte’s shivers continue to stratify his words into syllables, intermittently interrupting his account of a childhood spent evenly in thrall to Equal Vision emo and Foo Fighters, I reach over to offer the singer/guitarist my jacket. I expect him to decline, and indeed he does so politely, but I figure better to make an obviously empty gesture than set a precedent for being an inattentive journalist. Still, our genteel interaction leaves me with a tinge of weirdness. I’m left wondering what edgy, 17-year-old, Narrow Head worshiping me would have made of such politesse. I’d probably be upset that Duarte wasn’t warming himself by blowing cigarette smoke in my face, that he wasn’t acting like his songs — a distant, billowing plume of unknowable passion cloaked in mysterious aggression.
It’s not until everybody is settled inside — ordering BLTs and ready to discuss the lumbering path leading to Moments of Clarity, Narrow Head’s infectiously melodic and crisply produced third album — that I realize what a monstrous, inattentive idiot I’ve been. Duarte had never been shivering. Inside, the frontman’s voice continues as before — afflicted by a slight but unmistakable stutter. It’s a condition that Duarte has written songs about and has never been averse to discussing, yet somehow I’ve found a unique way to make him feel self-conscious. Overcome by guilt but unsure how to apologize, I elegantly direct the conversation to something I’ve spotted Duarte looking at on his phone — an article entitled “The New Wave of American Shoegaze.”
“Oh, y’all aren’t in that,” I stammer, slowly realizing I’m making Narrow Head’s eyes glaze over. “Though the same writer did an interesting thing about how you’re actually a part of the ‘grunge revival.’ The thesis of the article is that your music is not as dangerously charismatic and star-powered as the original… grunge. That its only purpose is to replicate the sonic aesthetics of that period.’”
“We can’t escape those words: ‘grunge,’ ‘shoegaze.’ Frankly, I’m getting really tired of this genre thing. It’s never been a target for us,” Duarte grumbles. “Narrow Head just, like, rock — we rock. The only way we know how. Our music is the intersection point of five people who listen to different things. We’re not in the studio asking ourselves, ‘How do we cash in on people’s ’90s nostalgia?’”
“I don’t want to sound like I’m like putting off a weird vibe,” Menjivar says. It’s funny how most of the temperamentally fucked-up rock gods Narrow Head are compared to would never start a sentence that way. “But really, we don’t do it for anybody else. We’re doing this for ourselves. The band is a reason to live and tour as friends, so that means writing the songs that we would like to hear.”
“You could have us go through a list of the 100 most consequential ’90s bands. Yes, we love Deftones. We love My Bloody Valentine,” Wilcox pleads. “I don’t think we sound much like any of it. Those bands have influence, but we’re in our own lane.”
Narrow Head’s frustration is understandable — a not-quite-so-young-anymore band who even among their admirers are often written about purely in terms of their reference points. All that tension falls away as our conversation turns from genre to focus instead on the bond of hang-out-everyday friendship (in the case of Menjivar and Duarte, going back to preschool) and commitment to craft that makes Narrow Head a great fucking rock band. Their self-deprecating humility, their scene-straddling gratitude, and their nerdy know-how are striking.
The band’s teenage origins were difficult, as they attempted to break out of their often inhospitable Texas scene. While the not-in-the-band-yet Menjivar was struggling to get his friends a show on a college circuit dominated by indie-pop, Wilcox was folding salami at Jimmy Johns, working to scrape together $400 for studio time to record Satisfaction. Though beloved by fans, the group spent years looking back on this period with embarrassment. It took the differently dispiriting experience of their sophomore album, 12th House Rock, for them to appreciate those hardscrabble roots today.
“Our second album was a total reaction,” Duarte says. “We’d finally gotten good live but were sick of playing the same songs. We were trying to be more diverse, write songs that were emotionally heavier. But we ended up with too much; after track five, the sequencing is totally random.”
“Satisfaction has almost aged better for me because there wasn’t really an agenda. It was like, ‘We’re 21 years old, we have a record of songs, let’s go,’” Wilcox laments. “On 12th House, we got so finicky with the production. We mixed the record like 50 times. It probably sounded best the year before it came out.”
The year it did come out, unfortunately, was height-of-the-pandemic 2020. Despite being their debut on beloved post-hardcore label Run For Cover, the album was obviously unable to make the splash the band hoped for. With tour plans canceled, and everyone in Narrow Head out of a job or stranded at home with their parents, the band took daily “refuge” in their practice space. Though Moments of Clarity emerged directly from these covid confines, listening to it, you’d never have a clue.
“Obviously, there was a lot of bad shit that year. People were dying. The world was fucked up,” Duarte recalls. “But you get through that year, you’re like, ‘Oh yeah I do wanna live my life.’ It’s honestly our least morose album.”
“Moments of Clarity is like a meta little story about us finding shelter by making the best album we could,” Wilcox effuses. “It’s what you’d get if the Narrow Head scientists from Narrow Head Corp got together over a little petri dish and distilled the perfect molecule of what we’re about.”
Don’t let that make you think Narrow Head are done expanding their sound. From “Sunday”’s upbeat single note riff and soaring chorus to the claustrophobic sludge metal of “Flesh & Solitude” (not to mention one scene-stealing drum machine cameo appearance that will go unspoiled), the album presents a wide sonic range. But unlike on 12th House Rock, these songs flow forward guided by a seamless tonal progression. Fans might find the album has the quality of a journey, from light into darkness and back out again.
Again unlike 12th House Rock, the album sounds exactly as the band intended. You can thank the contributions of legendary alt-rock producer and “honorary sixth Narrow Head member” Sonny DiPerri (My Bloody Valentine, Nine Inch Nails, DIIV). A week of rigorous pre-production in Texas meant the band had already hammered out every turnaround, phrase, and middle eight when it came time to record in Los Angeles (the first time the band have never had to foot a studio bill, Duarte bashfully admits). Perhaps that sounds like a recipe for bloodless proficiency from a group easily dismissed as expert mimics. But for Narrow Head, passion simply is precision.
“I probably hit my drum kit harder than I ever have,” Wilcox says. “For once, I didn’t have to think about anything.”
When it comes time to leave Yellow Jacket Social Club, the temperature outside has dropped lower than any guitar — even an eight-string Meshuggah monstrosity — could possibly downtune. As we move from the warmth of the bar into the frigid landscape beyond, the band are laughing to themselves. Somebody has floated the idea that they’ll all become assholes if they ever get as big as Metallica, and now Menjivar is reciting scenes out of Some Kind of Monster from memory.
“There’s one thing that gets me every time,” he says. “Every shot where Lars and James are arguing, someone’s holding, like, the nicest-looking sandwich.”
[Photo by Nate Kahn]
It’s several weeks later, past the holidays now, and it’s time to extinguish the anguish I’ve been harboring over my initial interaction with Duarte. Calling the frontman up late at night, my central prerogative is to apologize, but I also want to ask the question I hadn’t been bold enough to pose at the time. How has being the frontman for a semi-popular rock act affected Duarte’s relationship with his stutter?
“It’s always been a source of insecurity. I’m almost 30, and honestly, just in life, I feel more anxious about my stutter than ever,” Duarte explains. “Most people are chill about it, but in my head, I feel like it’s something I should have grown out of.”
But Duarte insists those uncomfortable feelings have never infringed on his work as a frontman. “Practically, it doesn’t change my singing at all, so music has always been a zone where I’m free of the stutter,” he adds. “If there’s any effect, it’s that the stutter keeps me from talking as much at a show. And at the end of the day, you don’t come to hear me talk anyways.”
Putting those words together has unlocked something in Duarte, calling forth all the exasperation Narrow Head had expressed about genre, categorization, and the standards of ’90s alt-rock superstardom they’ve been tasked with living up to. The billowing plume emerges.
“I’m not gonna be like fucking Kurt Cobain or Layne Staley. We don’t live those lives,“ Duarte says. “It’s 2023. There’s different ways of struggling. Why would I make music if I didn’t feel I fucking had to?”
