Krill
SIPS-001
Alam No Hris [reissue]
original release Mar 06, 2012
LP reissue Nov 18, 2022
Krill's debut album Alam No Hris is celebrating its tenth birthday in 2022. With assistance from actual label Sipsman, the band’s fake label Sren Records has remastered Alam No Hris for the occasion and pressed it to vinyl for the very first time, available November 18 worldwide.
Krill really kicked into gear in 2011, when Jonah Furman (Jon) graduated college and moved from Baltimore to Boston, where he joined Luke Pyenson (Lucky) and Aaron Ratoff (Alam) as they finished school. The move was not without intention. After a few promising long-distance practices, the trio were to “become a band” and make full use of their Somerville basement: write and arrange songs, record and release an album, play shows, and go on tour.
Simply put, Alam No Hris is a baker’s dozen of nervy, charming, lofi missives disguised as garage pop songs. “Whenever I think about Alam No Hris – the repetitive, incoherent joy on display in many of the songs – I think of it as ‘ecstatic’,” Jonah says. “The whole thing is like someone stammering to express themselves in a moment of overwhelming emotion. Ecstatic in the full sense, of standing outside of yourself.”
The kernels of Alam No Hris were hidden in earlier explorations: the jangling parable “32 Teeth” can be traced back to Aaron’s (and Ian Becker's, who would later join Krill) high school band Sea Monsters (krill are the diminutive version of sea monsters, get it?). Immersed in the fledgling Baltimore music scene of the early aughts, “Kissipaw” initially came from an attempt by Jonah to “make art rock” by fusing Bill Orcutt and Nobukazu Takemura into singer/songwriter glitch music. “Wet Dog” was written in Austin, Texas the summer Jonah spent exploring the David Foster Wallace archive. But these kernels would not be fully realized, fully ecstatic, until Jonah brought them to Aaron and Luke in that Somerville basement. Armed with barely-amateur recording technology and tracked entirely live, Krill unknowingly filled Alam No Hris to the brim with lovable fuckups that emphasize exuberance over expertise without losing the beat. In fact, moments like Aaron’s guitar unplugging during the bridge of the blistering faux-down “I Am The Cherry” feel serendipitously timed.
As word of mouth around Alam No Hris and Krill’s live shows spread, the band became firmly entrenched in Boston’s music scene alongside peers like Speedy Ortiz and Pile. This happened first in other neighborhood basements around Allston and Jamaica Plain, then at local venues like Great Scott and The Midway, then at storied Brooklyn DIY parlors like Shea Stadium and the Silent Barn, where they represented their scene on bills with LVL Up, Ava Luna, and Frankie Cosmos (which Luke later joined).
While their subsequent full-lengths on Exploding in Sound—2013’s Lucky Leaves and 2015’s A Distant Fist Unclenching—gained them national and international acclaim, respectively, Alam No Hris modestly introduced Krill, their self-described genre of “krillwave”, and their inane insular jargon (see: hris), to the Northeast DIY community. Reader, they’ve been hrissing about Krill ever since.