The Hard Quartet Release Eyedress-Directed Video for “Earth Hater” + Tour Dates

It’s a big day for idiots like myself. After weeks of teasing the project with brief clips and photos on social media, we finally have something solid from The Hard Quartet and details about their future. Three weeks ago, I began noticing Matt Sweeney (Chavez, Zwan, Superwolf) posting images of himself with Stephen Malkmus (Pavement, The Jicks, Silver Jews), Jim White (Dirty Three, Xylouris White), and Emmett Kelly aka Cairo Gang, hanging out together. He was eluding to a collaboration between the four of them, even posting a piece of paper they were using to entertain potential band names. I quickly shot a DM to one of my internet pals about it, before publishing a speculative post about it on here. The person that I DM’d, who is a personal friend of one of the members, agreed that it was “exciting,” but, unaware that nothing had officially been revealed, they let it slip that they’d “heard the album” and that I was “gonna love it!” I promised to keep my yap zipped. About 2 weeks ago, another friend of mine confirmed that they’d known about the project for a couple of months and that it would be released through Matador Records, as I expected. Today we get the band’s first single, a music video, and even few early tour dates. Today, The Hard Quartet becomes a real boy.

The rollout for this thing was somehow both quick and excruciating. Little videos of them outside all gathered around a boombox came across as if they were just listening back to a jam session among friends who happened to be in the same town together. If you didn’t already know that they’d officially formed the group and recorded an entire album, it would be nearly impossible to distinguish which stage of development they were at and if/when anything could actually develop from it. In a new post from Sweeney this morning, he states, “We’ve been doing this band on our own for a minute- very slowly then all at once.” He adds the promise that, “We’re gonna be doing lots of stuff.“

The first of this “stuff” being shared with us is the track, “Earth Hater.” It features Malkmus on vocal duties, but with Sweeney and Kelly also being skilled vocalists and multi-instrumentalists, all three of them can be expected to rotate between bass, guitar, vocals, and whatever else the material calls for. Nobody can man the drums quite like Jim White, whether in this project or elsewhere, so he’ll likely stay planted behind the kit whipping things up like Wesley Willis in a cyclone. The accompanying video shows the members depicted in claymation and was created by Filipino artist/musician/producer, Eyedress, who recently appeared as a guest on the Sweeney-hosted program, Guitar Moves.

Worth noting is the statement from one YouTube commenter who claims that this song was initially played with The Jicks during live shows around 2014 and 2015. If you look up shows from the band on Setlist.FM, there is a song named “Earth” that is credited as appearing at 7 different shows around that time, while one listed as “Earth Hour” was performed once. With the way that Malkmus is known to generate and store material, it’s quite possible that he never really found the tune’s potential or felt like it was ready until recently.

This morning, Matador Records used its social media to officially reveal their connection with The Hard Quartet in a post that contained the following description of the supergroup.

“The Hard Quartet is a band. But what is a band? A band, perhaps, can be thought of as a body, a corpus, in which physically discrete lifeforms comprise a chimera that shrieks with one voice. In this particular band, which is one of millions in the world today, four players selflessly merge, become musical, and emit rock ‘n’ roll that is familiar but new, warm but icy, melodic but Sphinx-like in its seductive and subtle riddles… essentially, The Hard Quartet has leveled, cultivated, and made lush an entirely new steppe in the ecosystem of guitar-bass-drums-voice agriculture.“

More importantly, the indie label revealed a trio of upcoming tour dates in Los Angeles, New York, and London. Even more important is the promise that “The Hard Quartet will be touring extensively in 2025.”

Tickets go on sale this Friday, 8/2 at 10am local times via thehardquartet.com