It took us a while to get to Big Smile, Greer’s long-awaited debut album. After four years and two EPs, the foursome behind Greer was feeling burnt and disconnected from the songs they’d written and toured. They went their separate ways for more than a year, retreating to their Southern California homes to decompress. When they reconvened in 2023, they went back to where it all started: drummer Lucas Ovalle’s garage. It was in this familiar environment that Ovalle, guitarist lead singer Josiah, guitarist Corbin Jacques, and bassist Seth Thomson learned how to be friends again and shared all the anxieties and revelations they’d endured on hiatus through crafting songs.
Those garage sessions turned out to be wildly productive. Between writing new songs, unearthing old drafts, and demoing them all, they entered the recording studio with over 200 songs written. The 13 that make up Big Smile are the band’s emotional champions that track the tumultuous period between the start of their break and the peace they found on their way back to each other. In the studio with fellow California legends Rob Schnapf (The Vines, Beck) and Matt Schuessler (Kurt Vile, Cat Power), Greer grew up again, taking more ownership over their sound and learning to speak producer-ese. As steep as the learning curve was, it’s that hard work that gives Big Smile its balance of brilliance and vulnerability. “Omnibus” the album’s opener, presents confusion in a vacuum of noise, the overbearing weight of loss and struggling to find purpose, which slowly tames and realizes itself, progressing through the track list; while “audio 77” is the gossamer, acoustic closer that reveals a placid beauty and quiet realization, concluding a long and chaotic haze. Every song in between is full of realizations that lead to the unburdened, uplifting “Audio 77.”
Big Smile is the sound of a band exorcising their demons, learning to trust themselves, and asserting themselves with newfound earnestness and maturity. It’s the sound of a band that’s fallen in love with rocking out again. It’s the sound of friends rediscovering each other and the magic that they can create together when they embrace each other’s vulnerable side. With Big Smile, Greer has arrived as a serious, and seriously fun, alt rock band with diversity of sound and unity of vision.
