“it’s a long wait, i suppose” is out now.
“The Year of the Hare is proud to release their debut long player, it’s a long wait, i suppose. The band was born of bedroom demos in the American heartland, but the project only became fully realized as a collective whose members found each other in the heart of New York City. What could have been a solitary project for founder Ryan Hopper was never meant to burn so poor and lonely. The Year of the Hare only truly became itself in communion with collaborators who forged a maximalist sound in their exuberant embrace of the intimacy of a crowded room.
The album sees some of the band’s early songs fully-realized as they have developed from demos to finely tuned compositions over countless performances in the last half decade. The album is the culmination of years of writing and tinkering; its genesis came across the ebb and flow of years, love found and nurtured, only to falter and fracture - loss and possibility swirling in the persistent march of time. The songs form a snapshot of continuing evolution, as the line-up that recorded this record has continued to shift - not a product of volatility, but the immutable constancy of change.
However distant from their Indiana roots, the influence of midwest emo and indie is never far from the surface alongside brushes of hardcore, Americana, math rock, chamber music, and ambient textures. In spite of these myriad influences, the work is cohesive in its dissimilitude, tying together its contradictions in the multitudes it contains. The Year of the Hare illustrates how to age and grow with vulnerability writ large. it’s a long wait, i suppose transcends melancholy in favor of ecstatic joy, balancing its nostalgic tone with forward-facing optimism, looking toward a future that is nothing if not an assemblage of past lives. This is an album of looking outward in spite of the isolation this world imposes on us all and a rejection of self-imposed seclusion.
The Year of the Hare is hearts on sleeves forever, singing for lost love, lost pets, lost futures, but ever looking ahead into an unknowable but hopeful future. There is no other way they could be.”
Words by
@worthypioneer 
