Gold Dust
In the months between wrapping up production on the first album and it eventually reaching the public, Pierce quickly began thinking about the follow-up. The reignition of a long-dormant interest in poetry brought a closer focus on lyricism and a deeper consideration of what the words were trying to express. The themes of isolation and self-doubt that floated in glistening clouds of reverb on the first album began to sharpen, and the language around these difficult feelings took on a new clarity.
Pierce’s songwriting has always held a distant sadness, but with The Late Great Gold Dust, the melancholy cuts through, feels more present and alive within the songs. There’s a muddy narrative arc to these twelve songs, getting more harrowing throughout the album’s second half as screams echo in the void until an exhausted sigh that sounds something like acceptance rises out of the murk. This incremental ramp up from the album’s lighter material to its most depressive follows the same Side A/Side B mapping that made both Neil Young’s On the Beach and Black Flag’s My War different articulations of the same creeping intensity.
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