Horse Jumper of Love (USA) live at Club Pave

Horse Jumper of Love S/T 10 Year Anniversary Deluxe Edition
Sometimes the best art happens when no one is paying attention. That was certainly the case for Horse Jumper of Love’s self-titled debut, an album of scrappy, aching slowcore, written in a basement, quietly put on Bandcamp and tape in 2016 by Disposable America, and then given a wider release on vinyl and streaming the following year by Run For Cover Records. The album's extremely humble origins might seem incongruous with its outsized impact—a decade on Horse Jumper of Love is widely regarded as an essential record of the 2010s, a key release that helped propel slowcore and shoegaze out of the musical dustbin and back into the indie rock zeitgeist—but at the time of its creation, the young band couldn’t have had lower expectations. Now, in celebration of the album’s tenth anniversary, Horse Jumper of Love and Run For Cover have expanded and re-mastered this cult classic, including a booklet of handwritten guitar tabs, archival photos, and an additional disc of unreleased b-sides, demos, and alternate versions. It’s a lovingly assembled tribute to a seminal record and to the time, place, and spirit from which it emerged.
In the spring of 2016, Horse Jumper of Love (guitarist/vocalist Dimitri Giannopoulos, bassist John Margaris, and drummer James Doran) were a fresh-faced trio of teenagers making a name for themselves in the Boston house show circuit. "I started writing these songs in my parents’ basement when I was nineteen years old,” explains Giannopoulos. He had no intentions with it besides the hope he’d make back the small amount of money it had taken to record. “It’s truly a slacker album in that way, one that could only have been born out of the shamelessness of being a worm. It came because it had to, because I was en route to fully submitting to mental illness and self-destruction. You put your art out because you burn to tap into some universal truth and make the world feel less alien. In hindsigh