Horse Jumper of Love Turn Little Moments into Magic on Natural Part

Horse Jumper of Love have a knack for picking up on the everyday magic that most people overlook. Their new album, Natural Part, finds the significance in the smallest details that you usually wouldn’t think twice about. On the follow-up to 2019’s So Divine, the Boston-based band continue to provoke profound emotion through obscure imagery and pensive slowcore.

When working on Natural Part, guitarist/vocalist Dimitri Giannopoulos decided to switch up his usual writing process. Through the record’s intricate instrumentation and heart-wrenching recollections, it’s clear that while Horse Jumper still have the same esoteric takes as earlier releases such as “Orange Peeler,” they also give themselves space to branch out, both sonically and lyrically.

A band that usually thrive on simplicity, they incorporate more ornate elements like a cello performance by Emily Dix Thomas that feels like they’re testing the waters of something denser before diving in. They also found themselves pulling inspiration from new sources of inspiration, such as Nirvana’s unplugged album and “Wonderwall” by Oasis, which they listened to while practicing for a Halloween cover set. “I definitely don’t write the same way I did for the other records anymore,” Giannopoulos said in a statement. “I never want to force anything or try to stick to a formula, and for this record I really felt like I could do whatever I wanted. I feel like I know myself a little more, like I’m a little more tapped into who I am and the songs feel more personal because of it.”

While Horse Jumper have shared a fair amount of intimate anecdotes (see the album art for their 2017 self-titled album), Natural Part feels like accidentally walking in on a private moment you weren’t supposed to have witnessed. There’s something about the specificity of the lyrics—the left-open drawers in the kitchen, falling asleep with the lights on, the cars driving by with the balloons in the back—that give you a sort of emotional deja vu. The more vivid the imagery, the harder it is to decipher if the inexplicable feeling in your chest is because you’ve experienced that moment, too, or because their minimalist lyrics give you just enough detail to perfectly recreate the scene in your head.

This sort of mystique is laced throughout the album as they recall a past that is undoubtedly subjective. Horse Jumper lean into the haze with fuzzy guitars and slow-burn build-ups that mirror the strange beginning phase of a memory returning to you. The layers of lush instrumentation act as a disguise for the gaps in Giannopoulos’ memory, a concept that both frightens and intrigues him, as he mentioned in a 2019 interview with Paste ahead of the release of So Divine. “A lot of the songs come from these really minor details or memories. Like, ‘Why the hell does this still resonate with me now?’ Maybe a memory that I had when I was like 14. Like, ‘Are these memories even real?’ I have no other recollection of that time in my life other than these few sparse moments. Maybe it’s just my memory’s really bad, and that’s why I write a lot of these songs.”