The Elephant 6-related group Nana Grizol have always been a thinking band. On their first few albums, 2008’s Love It Love It and 2010’s Ruth, the Theo Hilton-led indie band seemed mostly focused on personal issues, sometimes sounding like a jangly version of Bright Eyes in their early 2000s peak. If Hilton wasn’t pontificating on the complications of and the implications of living in the city, he was pondering how cherished relationships sometimes build and crumble so mysteriously. One of their most beloved songs, “Cynicism”, contains this lovely chin-scratcher: “…I never learned a lesson looking at my own reflection, but sometimes it seems useful. So I loosen my heartstrings in hopes of starting to find something useful.”
Hilton spits words like an impressionist splotched paint, for the feeling. 2017’s Ursa Minor saw Hilton pointing the camera out to the world and specifically to American culture. There are dissections of hetero-normative culture and diatribes against media bias. It was still as catchy as ever, but it had a little more weight. Nana Grizol’s new album South Somewhere Else, finds the band continuing to wrangle with this world. In these predominantly catchy songs, Hilton attempts to reckon with the racist past and present of the US South, where he grew up while looking to a future with a hopefully better version of himself.
“To imagine what’s to come. Not trapped by definition. A future version of yourself, choosing your intention,” is how Hilton commences Nana Grizol’s South Somewhere Else and there really could not be better opening lyrics for this album because within, Hilton is drawing stark lines in the sand. Yet he’s also reflecting on being on the wrong side of that line.