Michael Cormier-O'Leary has been involved with some of my favorite music of this decade. The Philadelphia musician is the composer for Hour, the basement-DIY chamber-pop ensemble whose spellbinding new album Ghost Bridge drops this Friday. He's also the longtime drummer for Friendship and 2nd Grade, two of the best bands in indie rock, and he co-runs Dear Life Records, a label whose catalog includes brilliant releases from MJ Lenderman, Wendy Eisenberg, Fust, Florry, Styrofoam Winos, Thomas Dollbaum, Armbruster, Little Mazarn, Nina Ryser, Shane Parish, and more.
Oh yeah, he put out a new solo EP this year too. Ghost Bridge was the occasion for my recent interview with Cormier-O'Leary. The album expands Hour to 13 members, giving him ample resources for conveying the melancholia and preemptive grief that inspired so much of the music.
It's a gorgeously plaintive collection of tracks, elegant in a way you wouldn't normally associate with basement recording sessions by artists rooted in the punk scene. With each successive listen, I'm more impressed. Last week, Cormier-O'Leary spent an hour discussing Hour plus his recent solo EP Proof Enough, the backstory of Dear Life Records, his intersecting creative communities, and more.
Listen to Hour's new single "Sky Is Blue" — the only track on the album with vocals — and read our conversation below. You went six years without a new Hour album, and now you’ve put out two studio albums and a live album between like 2024 and now. Was that just a matter of inspiration striking, or was there like some more mundane logistical delays?
Why is this band becoming a prolific force again? MICHAEL CORMIER-O’LEARY: The pandemic does fall in there, a not insignificant two-year stretch. I also moved to Maine from 2021 to 2023, and that is how the band grew to include some folks from up there.
So the first shows after the pandemic were with a Northeast version of the band. And I was writing stuff that whole time. But yeah, I just didn't feel the urgency.
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