Giants of May • Still Love You.

This isn't something that we would normally cover over at TheseDays, but since one of our staff members founded See Beyond Genre and because a genre/boundary creates unnecessary division, we felt it necessary to include this rather unique 22 minute release. When I say 22 minutes, I mean 22:00:00. On the dot.

Giants of May might be a band of 40 friends. It might be one guy hunkering down in his bedroom somewhere in Chicago. Regardless of size and background, the name Giants of May surfaced on December 29, 2015, first with the tweet “pumpkins”, then with the debut album five days later. I'm still not sure what to make of this release, but it certainly forces me to be unable to work on anything else. This isn't background music while you do your homework. This is “listen closely because this is beautiful madness” music. It's ambient, it's progressive, and it even has some spoken word included. 

Still Love You. In the artist's own words:

This thing is a kind of love letter, my small way of expressing immense gratitude. To friends, to my favorite bands, to the creative process itself, to anything I've drawn strength from when I regularly need it.

Still Love You is made out of some Beck drums, some Bjork strings, a lot of Bloc Party, a Busdriver yell, a couple Chemical Brothers beats, some Laurel Halo piano, a lot of Smashing Pumpkins, even more U2, and the beautiful voices of my friends Josh, Masood, Jenn, and Karolina.