Spacecase Records

Hail Disaster, the second album from Minneapolis-based band True Green, is a darker, warmer follow up to their 2024 lofi debut My Lost Decade. Songwriter Dan Hornsby is also a novelist (his book Via Negativa is being adapted into a film starring Young Mazino) and he brings his knack for storytelling to these songs, exploring tragedies real and imagined, ranging from family cruelty (“Italian Lightning”), to the dark side of fandom (“Beatlemania”), doomed love (“Hamlet + Juliet”), and the death of Hornsby’s uncle from AIDS (“Terry’s Parrot”). “The first half of your life is Tetris, the second half is Jenga,” Hornsby sings, summing up the record’s themes on “Bodysurfing.” Multi-instrumental ringer Tailer Ransom plays organ, banjo, synthesizers, concertina, and the occasional guitar, lending a poignant, bittersweet frame to Hornsby’s lyrics. In the liner notes, novelist and critic Justin Taylor says: “Dan’s vocals are mellow as ever, but the wisdom he’s sharing (also the jokes, stories, visions, and love) feels hard-won, wrested from the quenchless jaws of the disaster that his title hails.”

Hail Disaster was mixed and mastered by Matt Castore (Condominium, Scrunchies) at Soft Cult Studio, with additional tape mastering by Matt Qualls at Easley McCain Recording.