by Dan Goldin (@paintingwithdan)
New York City’s Henry Grant has been busy over the past five years, writing and releasing music at a pace that lends itself to near constant rotation and yet he’s not doing it to appease anyone but his own creative drive. With a trio of full length albums during that stretch (the most recent, Movies, was released in December) and a giant heap of singles to accompany them, Grant aka Henry Terepka (formerly of Brooklyn psych pop extraordinaries Zula) is always pushing his project forward, exploring the outside lines of kaleidoscopic sound. With melodies that stick like glue and an open playbook for fluid grooves that split the difference between alternative rock, dream pop, and indie rock, his music is both swirling but grounded. Following a pair of singles released in March, Henry Grant returns with “Blue Circle Park,” a blissful look at the less than blissful privately owned public spaces of Manhattan.
With gentle acoustic guitars, atmospheric pops of synth, and a bedroom pop rhythm, Henry Grant presents us the with earworms around every turn, bass bubbling up one moment, the hum of sustained keys, a beat that would make The Stone Roses proud, and at the center, Terepka’s calming vocals. As he meditates on these semi public spaces (owned privately by the wealthy and made available as common space for New Yorkers in exchange for zoning favors), his thoughts move toward our modern surveillance state, the real life atrocities enacted by our government as people are monitored, taken from their homes, and dispersed from our communities.