Horse Jumper of Love's Dimitri Giannopoulos on Slowcore, Quitting Drinking, and Duster's Brilliant Simplicity

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it.

True to their musical style, Horse Jumper of Love's appeal has been a slow build to my ears: I found 2022's Natural Part very intriguing and was quite taken by last year's more acoustically-driven Heartbreak Rules, and the band's just-released fourth album Disaster Trick is their best record yet, delving into heavier territory than before for the three-piece. I talked to bandleader Dimitri Giannopoulos earlier this summer about this latest achievement as well as a bunch of other topics, check it out:

Do you live in Bushwick?
Yeah.

OK, I live in Bushwick too. I saw a car a few blocks away from my apartment that had a bumper sticker that said, "Keep honking, I'm listening to Horse Jumper of Love." Is that your car?
No, no, no. That would be funny if it was my car, though—if I was repping my own band with a bumper sticker. But that's sick that you saw that car out in the wild.

How long have you lived in the area for?
Four months now, so I'm still pretty new. Since I moved here, I've been on tour a bunch, so I'm still getting used to it.

The band's origins are in Boston, where I do feel like I'm always hearing some interesting indie rock coming from. Tell me about your experience making music within that community.
I grew up in Boston, and I started going to house shows when I was 16 or 17. I'd played music since I was a kid—I've been playing guitar forever—but when I went to my first house show, it just blew my mind. I was like, "Wow, there's all these cool people in a house just getting together and playing music." That was the moment where I was like, "I want to do this."

The band was really influenced by all of the house shows I saw in Boston in the 2010s. I saw Pile at a house, and that blew me away. I used to go see Krill all the time. There was definitely a sound going on—it was like slacker-ish rock, but kind of heavy, with existential lyricism. At that time, I was only listening to local bands.

You mentioned a heavy sound in that sphere—this record also sounds like the heaviest Horse Jumper LP to date. Tell me more about leaning into that.
The last thing we put out was pretty acoustic, which was a result of spending a lot of time alone in my room. I could only play acoustic guitar there. It's really funny, every time my band releases something, my dad always has a critique. He was like, "You know, you should really play the guitar louder. When I go to your shows and you play 'Ugly Brunette,' people start nodding their heads to the heavy part. You should really do that more." I listened to him—not because my dad said it, but it really stuck with me, because he said it to me a bunch of times.

I started thinking about the first album we put out, and I wanted to connect back to that. I wrote that album when I was really young—a lot of those songs are from when i was like 18 or 19 years old. I'm 30 now, so it's been over 10 years. I wanted to tap into that original sound we had, but make it about the person who I am today.

Tell me about bringing in other people on this record as well. Karly and MJ from Wednesday are on it, and so is Ella from Squirrel Flower.
We recorded the record in Asheville at Drop of Sun, and we're friends with Karly and Jake. We were at their house one day, just talking, and they were like, "We'll come by the studio tomorrow and hang out." They just were there and played their tracks—it happened really naturally. Then I was like, "I should ask like more friends to play on stuff," so I asked my friend Ella to sing on some tracks.

A big part of music, for me, is just meeting people. I like having my friends play on tracks whenever they can, because it'll remind me of this time when we were young and playing music. and I don't know how things will change in the future. I might not be super close with these people, and it's a nice little bookmark of my life right now. That's how I've always thought about my songs, too. They're just little pockets of my life that I can look back on. It's like journaling.

You guys have put out a few records at this point, and to my ears, your songwriting has unquestionably changed across them. Reflect on where you're at as a songwriter now. What what muscles are you exercising that you weren't exercising before?
When I first started writing songs, I was really insecure about what I had to say, so I'd deliberately try to obscure things a little more. With this record, I wanted to still kind of do that, but I did want to try to be more direct at times. I think that comes with the confidence you build over time from performing—being in front of people and having to socialize all the time. That's made me feel more okay with who I am and what I want to try to say through this project. My main goal now is to try to be a little more direct, and also to say to myself that less is is more. I'm trying to cut more lyrics and be more straightforward going forward.

The press materials mentioned that you quit drinking while making this record as well. Did that affect your ability to be straightforward?
Definitely, For the past 10 years, I wrote my stuff like when I was fucked up all the time. This time, I was forced to be sober in my room, and it felt like I was confronting something. I really like enjoyed it. I was like, "Okay, I'm gonna do this. There's no veil here. I can't mask what I'm feeling with alcohol, I just have to put it out." Not drinking definitely had a lot to do with it.

How long has it been since you quit?
I think a year and a half.

That's amazing, congratulations.
Thank you. I struggled with it for a while, because it just happens when you're a musician, with touring. I'm easily stressed, very sensitive, and I get emotional, so I was on tour drinking all the time. I would come home, and it wouldn't stop, and at some point I had to just be like, "Oh shit, I feel awful. I'm gonna fucking get sick if I keep drinking like this for the rest of my life." I also wasn't being productive. I'd go on tour, and that was the most productive thing I was doing. I'd come home, go to work, and be fucked up all the time When I stopped drinking, I felt like I could straight-up just work on songs.

I quit drinking during the pandemic—more than three years ago. It was one of those things where I was like, "Oh shit, I could do this every day if I wanted to." And I'll fucking love it, too—but you do get to that point where you're like, "Yeah I'm killing myself, this is crazy." My experience was, you quit and you're like, "Oh my God, everything feels different, and new, and better," and then you're like, "Wait, I still have all these problems I gotta deal with, this fucking sucks."
For me, the fog was lifted, and I was like, "Oh shit, I haven't been looking at life in a real way for a really long time." I mean, I fucking love drinking. I love getting fucked up.

Oh, it's the best.
It's fucking awesome. I wish I could still do it, but I feel a lot better this way.

Same. Let's talk more about maturity in general, I hear a lot of that expressed in the lyrics of this album. Tell me about how that comes through, and how it intertwines with your personal life.
I think about my first album and how immature it is. When we play shows, there's a lot of younger kids who are the age I was when I wrote that album. I love that they can relate to that. I just wanted to write something that felt a little more mature—more for people my age. I'm way different than I was when I wrote that album, but because I have to go on tour and perform those songs, I feel like I'm stuck in that time sometimes. I had to force myself to break out of that and be like, "Okay, you don't have to go the rest of your music career writing and playing the songs you wrote when you were 19—you can write songs about the way you feel now, and then maybe you can do it in the same way that the first album sounds."

Maybe I can help the kids who are listening to that album grow out of that. That age always feels very "Everything's all about me and my sensitivity," and I want the younger people who listen to my music to be like, "I guess I can get out of that headspace." You're not going to be like that forever. You're going to grow up, things are going to change.

How do you feel like you've changed?
I feel like I was going through my twenties, going on tour and playing music, and I got into destructive habits in my personal life. I've been an alcoholic, and shitty to people. The main way I've changed is that I've been able to reflect on it and try to correct my behavior. It's very much in the realm of possibility that I could've just stayed like that forever. But I feel good about where I'm at now. I feel like I can look back on the past 10 years and see like the rest of my life and be like, "Okay, that was wrong, I need to be better and move forward, but not dwell on it."

Tell me about making the cover art for your records.
I do the cover art mainly because any time I've asked someone to do the cover art, I just haven't liked it. It's not I necessarily love my own cover art, but I like the last one I did. I think it's just a control thing I have—presenting the songs and being like, "These are mine, and this is the artwork I did for it," because it's what makes sense to me.

What creative muscles do you feel like you're flexing when you're drawing as opposed to making music?
They're the same as my songwriting muscles. There's always something I'm trying to get across. For this album, I had the lady in the center, and the bird on the string is her trying to control the future while the past is behind her, which is represented by the cloud—the dark, depressing past—while the dog is the fun, playful past. That's very much an idea I'd try to get across in a song, but it's cool to have different ways to express whatever the idea is.

I don't really draw a lot. I mostly do it when I have to, which is usually for album art, or a shirt design. Once in a while, some fan will ask me to draw something for the at a show. One time, someone did that and they came to the next show and had it tattooed on their body. I was like, "Oh wow, that's crazy." I was like, "Shit, I wish you told me you're gonna do that—I would've spent a little more time on the drawing."

You've been putting out records at a pretty steady clip for a minute now. Back in 2019, you opened up for Duster. It seems accurate to say that you're of a higher profile now than you were before.
That was huge for us—career-wise, but also personally. When I first heard Duster—it must've been 2014, on YouTube or something—it really changed the way I wrote and thought about music. I heard Contemporary Movement first, the song "Cooking," and I was like, "Holy shit, this is the best thing I've ever heard." I was really obsessed with Duster, and early on I was really inspired, so getting those shows was huge. I felt star-struck for the first time. and they were really nice, cool dudes.

Back then, the people coming to the Duster reunion shows were older guys who listened to them in the '90s. Now that they blew up and got big, there's a bunch of younger kids listening to them, and I feel like that's kind of happened to us too. The people who know about and listen to us are kids who are on TikTok who are obsessed with duster as well.

Back in 2019, a lot of people were comparing us to Duster and being like, "Oh like you guys are like slowcore," but I don't really relate to that label as much anymore. My songs are definitely slow, but it feels like a little more like straightforward indie rock now.

I'm 37, and when I was absorbing the indie rock canon as a teenager, I'd never heard of Duster. I didn't even really have any awareness of them until the Numero reissues, honestly. I'm so fascinated by the fact that younger people have caught onto Duster so easily. Tell me more about how Duster spoke to you as a young person.
Part of it was a reaction to the music that was so popular for so long. I was a teenager in the early 2010s, and the stuff I was listening to a lot of—finding on the blogs at that time—was Animal Collective and stuff, which I love. I felt like there was like a lot going on—Animal Collective's albums were crazy, there were so many tracks. When I heard Duster, it was like this feeling of relief where I could breathe for a second, because it's so minimal and so powerful at the same time. I'd never heard something that minimal that was that powerful.

When I was young, demoing songs and recording shit in my room, I was adding so much bullshit that, I think, speaks to materialism—how you're always adding shit into your life. It was nice to listen to a band that was pretty bare-bones. It just spoke to me in that way.

I gotta say, that is the most interesting explanation for Duster's appeal that I have heard to date.
The fidelity of that music made me feel like it was possible for me to do it—and that's kind of how we did it. We recorded the the first record in a room with like our friend who recorded, and we just kind of just did it. For the longest time, I thought that if I wanted to be in a band and record an album, I had to somehow fund going to a studio and make this really produced thing, so it was so inspiring in that way. I think that's why younger people are relating to it even now. They're so like bombarded with shit all the time on the internet that it's nice to listen to something that's not trying too hard. There's a naturalness to it that is becoming more and more scarce like right now.