On the Rise
ira glass

Each impulsive action can potentially become the latest buzzword, any image can become the subject of overwrought psychoanalysis; a randomly spoken or written word can leave a fallout of erroneous assumption. And it could all happen beyond one's control at any given moment. Thinking about this too long and too hard could elicit permanent, paralysing shell shock.

Chicago four piece ira glass funnel this demented combo of glee and dread right down to the obdurate minutiae. At the time of this interview, they have been a band for three years. In that period of time, they have irreverently – and refreshingly – devolved from the usual 21st-century starting-the-band playbook, courting obscurity at every twist and turn. And it feels as if they do so by sheer necessity.

First and foremost, ira glass are not a very online band: they were formed the classic way, through flyers posted around the city by singer and guitarist Lise Ivanova. Their reputation was gained not through carefully curated social reels, but through old school means: ripping bars, warehouses, and basements to shreds with their firebrand live shows.

Within Chicago’s distinguished grassroots ecosystem, scene dwellers are collectively scratching their heads on what to make of this loud and noisy band who, for some reason, opted to name themselves after the host of This American Life. “We're too complicated for the hardcore people, we don't scream enough for the screamo people, but the free jazz people really like us and the noise people really like us,” Ivanova observes flippantly. “But, yeah, it's hard to fit in anywhere… I would agree.”

Mind you, the band – which also now includes sax player Jill Roth, drummer Landon Kerouac, and bass player Kaleb Wallace – haven’t exactly bothered trying to fit in. Before being pulled into by Chicago’s gravitational force, where they found each other, each member of ira glass ambled along the fringes of the American Midwest.

Ivanova bounced between New Mexico and Alabama, where she met Wallace during her study at Alabama University. They briefly had a band together called Thrush that played only one show together. She then lived in LA for a year, with ambitions to become a filmmaker, but those dreams were quickly circumvented once she dipped her toes inside that world. “Seeing the kind of output that's coming out of today's young filmmakers was extremely discouraging," she says. "I grew up with this idea of wanting to be like David Lynch or something. [But] the path to become somebody like David Lynch just doesn't exist anymore. Everyone’s attention spans are blitzed, and there's not much promising new cinema.”

Chicago suddenly became an appealing proposition for Ivanova: the cost of living was relatively unknown, and there was a lot of creative energy to plunge into. At the time she didn’t know anyone in the city, but posting around 30 or 40 flyers at strategic spots would surely attract like-minded individuals to start a new band, she thought. And it did. Kerouac, who was working with Roth at a bakery at the time, spotted one of Ivanova's flyers while strolling home on Milwaukee Avenue, and the band took off from there, with Kerouac coaxing Roth to join in.

“I grew up 30 minutes east of Seattle,” Roth says in a languid, measured speaking voice that presents a comedic counterpoint to Ivanova’s more perky jolts of thought. “I started playing sax when I was 12 or 13 years old. I played in concert and jazzbands throughout school, and I stayed around through college. I got a degree in visual art and a minor in music. I just studied jazz throughout that period. I just wanted to get out of the Pacific Northwest, because it felt a little dry. It was hard to meet people and make a community. I wanted to be in a bigger city, more of an art scene going on. “

Before joining ira glass, Kerouac had recently returned to Chicago after being in Montréal for four years, taking classes in electroacoustic studies. It's not an obvious link, going from studying the work of a Stockhausen to drumming in ira glass, but he says he views music more in terms of “the timbre, the spectral morphology, the movement of the sounds,” which brings a keen intentionality to how he approaches his playing – thinking well beyond simply providing a pulse. “What is the most creative, cool, and expressive thing that you can do at any moment?”, he muses, “That doesn't lend itself well to a conducive songwriting experience, but I think it's an exhausting yet important songwriting philosophy for me.” He cites Bill Bruford – and specifically the prog rock drum legends work on King Crimson’s Red album – as a formative influence.

Like Ivanova, Kerouac set a different path for himself before joining ira glass. He admits that in his younger, more wide-eyed days, he got briefly swept up into the mythology behind his family name – indeed, the famous beat poet Jack Kerouac happens to be his great grandfather's cousin. “I was just drinking and writing and listening to a lot of jazz. I was heavily drinking… I was just an asshole, basically,” he states bashfully. “Later, I realised those sorts of philosophies or politics, the ones that only emancipate yourself, are for losers. So I shifted my priorities to emancipatory politics of bigger groups of people.” “I read On The Road when I was 13 and even then I was like, ‘This shit sucks’," Ivanova interjects. "It's boring as fuck. I've never really been into that kind of thing.”

With their inner romantics crushed early on, ira glass vaulted into their own frazzled DIY trajectory like a band with nothing to lose. Catharsis seems to be the main directive of the music. “I think we've all been really miserable in our lives,” Ivanova says, morbidly maintaining her same bubbly cadence. “We have been either extremely miserable or extremely angry, and that has informed our experiences.”

Initially, they operated as a fivesome, still with guitarist Sunny Betz and bassist Gavin Swope as full-time members. Before the band had any intention of making a splash, they received some unexpected early buzz from Stereogum, bringing down unexpected scope on a group of young people still in flux about their own inner dynamics. With this preliminary lineup, ira glass recorded debut EP compound turbulence flexing for the heat, a feverish collection of death jazz/noise rock episodes that sometimes echo Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem Of A Dream in their addled atmospherics. The record was recorded in Steve Albini’s famous Electric Audio studio with collaborator/friend Brooks Hannon, and subsequently dedicated to the late legendary producer. After that, the lineup of the band reshuffled – Betz and Swope left – and Ivanova coaxed her old pal Wallace to come over from New Mexico to jump into the void.

Now a steady four-piece on the rise, Ivanova argues the notion of fun holds any sort of sway within ira glass. The band’s new EP joy is no knocking nation (a title snipped from the Dylan Thomas-poem When, Like A Running Grave) treats defeatism like a rallying point. Opener “it’s a whole 'who shot john' story” unfolds like a Macy’s Day Parade of ghoulish undead, while “fritz all over you” jumpscares with a frothing-at-the-mouth noise-punk pounce, before taking a staggeringly beautiful turn in its outro. Roth’s saxophone flourishes brush the canvas like beams of first light through dimmed drapes, sounding almost like Cole Porter on benzos, offering a sense of odd reprieve in ira glass’s music that feels perpetually stuck in fight-or-flight delirium – and heightening the notion that the band's mercurial ways are not averse to spells of evocative beauty.

When asked of the source of their hard-to-pinpoint ferocity, Kerouac seems to be as puzzled as the next person – despite playing in the band himself. As of this moment, there is a stronger notion on what ira glass doesn’t want to be. “In the spirit of how saturated everything is, we kind of distinguish ourselves not only in what we do, but what we don’t do. And this one moment just really bummed me out: I remember being in a green room of a venue and listening to two bands talking to each other – I will not name any names – talking in certain motions in your Instagram reels, that trick the viewer into keeping their attention on it longer. I mean, these are two musicians talking to each other about engagements on social media like that.”

“Everyone’s forced into this role now,” Roth chips in. “And it’s not necessarily evil,” Kerouac contines. “But it felt like ‘these are the trade secrets on how to farm engagement’, almost like insider baseball. That band later blew up because of an Instagram story or a TikTok reel. So I guess it sort of worked.”

ira glass, meanwhile, prefer to labour in different aspects, pouring their collective energies into physical and manual methods, from Roth designing the artwork and merch to Ivanova using her filmmaking chops to create visuals. Ivanova describes the recording process of joy is no knocking nation (with Hannon at Jamdek Studio and West Town Magnetics) as “pretty unpleasant.” “Sometimes it’s fun, but we do have a tendency towards torture,” she explains. “We did track everything live simultaneously in different rooms in the studio, and it was all recorded to tape, which, logistically proved to be a little difficult to dub over things, or we couldn't punch in places as easily, which was torture to us.”

Where most bands mine ideas from crystallised notions and themes, ira glass find warped illumination in the scrapyard of incoherent thoughts, blitzes of non-sequiturs and rabbit holes of esoteria that inevitably lead to cul de sacs. One of the few things that does make sense is the mascot of joy is no knocking nation: a spazzed-out city pigeon who looks like it just flew full speed against a high-rise window, now operating on maybe a quarter of its mental capacity. “There’s this really freaky thing that happens to the body when you get tetanus,” Kerouac says after I bring up the artwork. “You get in this spasmic pose called opisthotonus. Basically, if you get strychnine poisoning, all the nerves in your body start firing, and your body just arches, and it becomes super tense and rigid.”

ira glass liken themselves more as an autonomous (in Ivanova’s words) “friend group” than denizens of one specific scene, but nevertheless a friend group with a strong drive to mutate further from the primordial soup of whence they came. “This band is probably one of the most important projects of my life,” Ivanova says. “It means a lot to me, and it's been like the primary creative output of my life for the past three years. But I do think I'm a bit cynical about the state of the music industry and music scenes all around the world. And so that weighs on me. We do think a lot about what we are doing. What's next, what's the goal, and what might our coming years look like. And I think, recently, we've decided we're going to take the winter to focus more on our new compositions, really nailing down a compositional direction, because our range of influences is so broad.“

How to evolve and be ambitious as a band without getting sucked too deeply in the industry machine is a challenge ira glass heedlessly charge at. Even if that very charge becomes a road to nowhere, towards the deepest of canyons – Wile E. Coyote-style – it seems worth the torture. “I haven’t been around in the music scene for multiple decades, so I don’t really know how trends work,” Kerouac denotes. “I don’t want to tie this observation to a specific era, but it does feel like the halflife of a musical trend is getting shorter and shorter. You’ll get this wave of post-Brexit art punk or whatever, and you write a song that sounds like black midi, people will just write you off as derivative. Even something that feels very 2025, like YHMH Nailgun, I can already see that becoming a pastiche sooner and sooner.”

“There’s nothing new anymore,” Ivanova adds. “And we talk about this all the time. This is kind of our central torture of being: what’s new, interesting or subversive? And we never really get an answer. Because the answer is that stuff doesn’t really exist anymore. There aren’t real scenes, just friend groups. But still… I love my friends!”

“The one thing I feel we have figured out, is to not necessarily be new, but to just be unmistakable,” Kerouac concludes. “But being in that path can also be lonely. At least for me. Because if you are to rip off something, you have the people who already like it. So it’s a never-ending math equation that’s fun to solve.”