Tall Days Return with ‘Breakers’, Their First Album in Seven Years
New Jersey duo Tall Days return today with ‘Breakers’, their first new album in seven years.
Graham Hartke and Joe DeAngelus recorded the album themselves at their Snack Factory studio in Montclair between March 2024 and February 2026. The basic setup remains simple: guitar, drums and two people trying to make as much noise as possible.
This time, though, they let a few more things into the room.
Saxophone, Hammond organ, recorder and plenty of extra percussion turn up across the record, without changing the fact that Tall Days still sound best when everything feels a little rough around the edges.
Hartke describes ‘Breakers’ as an album of opposites. Some songs came out of anger and frustration, while others are about family, affection and hanging on to a little optimism when the wider world is making that difficult.
‘Destroy’ arrived almost all at once before a show at Our Wicked Lady in Brooklyn, with Hartke writing from the aftermath of a bad breakup. ‘Gaslight Bomb’, meanwhile, is aimed at people who insist on their own version of reality and expect everybody else to go along with it.
Then there is ‘She Is My Girl’, written for Hartke’s young daughter. The mood changes completely, and so does the arrangement, with congas, bongos, claves, guiro, vibra-slap, cabasa and maracas joining the usual guitar-and-drums setup.
Family turns up elsewhere too. Hartke’s daughter Hannah, his sister Rebecca and his brother Matt Hartke all sing backing vocals on the album.
The New Jersey and New York connection has always been part of Tall Days as well. Montclair is home, but the band have spent years moving back and forth across the Hudson, playing Brooklyn and Manhattan while keeping their own studio on the Jersey side.
That history is especially obvious on ‘NYC Rock ’N’ Roll’, one of the lighter moments on an album that otherwise spends quite a bit of time wrestling with frustration.
Tall Days brought in several people to help finish the record. Mixing was shared between Brent Kolatalo, Matt Maroulakos, Rubin Nizri and Hartke himself, while Bill Skibbe mastered the album at Third Man Mastering.
‘Breakers’ follows earlier Tall Days releases that picked up airplay from WFMU, SiriusXM and Q104.3, while ‘All in My Way’ later appeared in ‘Lucifer’ and ‘Crosstown’ in ‘Difficult People’.
Seven years is a long gap, but ‘Breakers’ does not sound like a band trying to reinvent itself. It sounds more like Tall Days figuring out how much more they can pile onto the same basic idea without losing what made it work in the first place.
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