“It clicked for me one day, that the album was going to be about hornets,” explains Sputnik, the mononymous songwriter behind the noise-pop project Weatherday. “It just made sense to me.” Hornet Disaster, Weatherday’s follow-up to their 2019 debut Come in, and spiritual successor to 2022’s collab release Weatherglow, is their most expansive work to date. In Weatherday’s initial bout of inspired writing and recording, they produced over 70 songs for the record, but not before they had a complete, overarching narrative that was coherently tied back to Sputnik’s previous work. Like its predecessor Come in, Weatherday’s Hornet Disaster lurches instantly into a caustic title track. The overture is signature Weatherday — urgent, noisy, erratic, and playful — but also hints at shifts in songwriting and production. Lead single “Angel,” backed with “Heartbeats,” demonstrates this evolution in a snappy, springy emo anthem, while its counterpart calls on longtime influence The Knife in a slinky, downtempo curio that pushes the Weatherday sonic universe in an unexpected direction. The movement, color, and form of hornets are meticulously threaded throughout the album’s nineteen song tracklist, with hectic melody and unpredictable turns giving way to various forays: a tribute to Swedish winter in Weatherday’s first official song in Swedish (“Pulka”); the use of renaissance flute (“Green Tea Seaweed Sea”); and the folktronica experimentalism of third single “Ripped Apart By Hands.” It’s a bustling record with disparate songs each vying for space like wasps in a swarm. It can inspire caution and chaos, but there’s wonder, purpose, and a certain familiarity there, too. Weatherday has extended the knotted, thrashing maximalism of Come in by doubling down with the uncompromised, no-stone-unturned nature of Hornet Disaster. Where Come in was the product of an artist searching for their voice, Hornet Disaster represents the joyful abandon that comes from having found it.

Alternative Rock from Phoenix, AZ