Glom’s third album Below is a highly potent mixture of indelible, infectious melodic rock and lyrical introspection that anyone who’s ever found themselves contemplating life’s many anxieties will surely relate to. Sean Dunnevant’s follow-up to 2020’s Merit is a true raising of stakes as well as the most fully realized version of his creative vision to date, as every one of these 10 songs is jam-packed with swirling guitar textures and the type of punchy choruses that stick in your mind and stay there. Suffice to say, feeling uncertain about life and the world at large has seldom sounded so downright pleasurable to hear as this album.In a sense, Below is the culmination of Dunnevant’s musical journey to date, which began with him skipping the college path to gig with a band straight out of high school. After that group dissolved, Glom was borne out of the ashes; two albums followed, 2019’s Bond and Merit, both made with producer and longtime friend Sahil Ansari and the latter funded by Dunnevant betting on himself and cashing out a college fund established by his parents from his father’s postal service job.Much like the rest of the industry, Glom took an effective pause during COVID times, and by the time the world opened up again Dunnevant decided to move forward with the project as a solo endeavor. A plum opening slot for Bloc Party followed in 2023 and was succeeded by him and Ansari hitting the studio to record Below the following summer. “This record finally represents my full vision,” Dunnevant explains. “There was no one else to really bounce ideas off of.”Below sounds current and classic all at once, equally resembling the crunchy and high-definitions sounds of ‘90s alternative rock as well as fellow virtuosic and emo-adjacent peers like Dazy and Liquid Mike. Fittingly, Dunnevant was specifically inspired by Third Eye Blind’s seminal 1997 self-titled debut: “I started getting really obsessed with the production, trying to dissect what was going on from a recording standpoint,” he explains, elaborating that he and Ansari watched YouTube videos of Third Eye Blind producer Eric Valentine breaking down that many of its songs are built atop an underlying drum loop. “When you listen to it, there’s always something that’s giving back a pulse,” he says. Dunnevant is also a disciple of Smashing Pumpkins, which shouldn’t be a surprise to listeners who have bore witness to Glom’s alchemical and shimmering guitar sounds. “Those early records have this otherworldly-sounding guitar—it’s so lush,” he says of Billy Corgan’s influence on his own playing. “I wanted a lot of the songs to have that.” Dunnevant highlights “Virginia,” with its miles-wide chorus and six-string surges, as exemplary of this sonic approach: “It’s a weird song, because I wanted it to be poppy and pretty heavy at the same time. I wanted this really rich-sounding, distorted guitar.”“Virginia” also pulls together several distinct narrative threads—a nod to his late grandmother, a trip to the beach with his fiancé—to emphasize why Dunnevant describes the record as “a snapshot of my life” between 2022 and 2024. “I was experiencing extreme stress that was bleeding into everything,” he says, and those feelings bleed into “Glass,” which specifically reflects the anxiety felt on a plane ride en route to a friend’s wedding: “They were the first person in our friend group to get married, which is a big moment for anybody—a moment where you’re like, ‘What am I doing with my life?’ The song is partially about being on the plane, and being like, ‘Oh my God, what if this plane goes down? What if it just explodes?” Such lyrical directness is new territory for Glom. “With the previous Glom records, I took a lot of time to make the lyrics veiled and mysterious,” Dunnevant explains. “With this record, I didn’t want to do that anymore. I wanted the lyrics to mirror what was happening in real life.” To wit, the expansive opening track “Mirror” references selling Rick Owens clothes for rent as well as his old, heat-bereft apartment, sitting in the cold with his down coat on while convincing himself that everything was fine. “My belief is my only weakness,” he says, directly referencing the song’s lyrics. “I want things to work out so bad that I’m willing to put up with the fact that our apartment doesn’t have heat, because that’s the only apartment we can afford.” Much of Below was, notably, written around the time Dunnevant turned 30, which he describes as “a big milestone for peoples’ lives and careers.” “Sometimes, people get married, start families, and have like a stable career figured out—and some don’t,” he says. “I fall into the latter category, which is the struggle of being an artist.” Fittingly, the guitar-ripper “My Body Loves Me” zeroes in on the corporeal changes that come along with aging, while “Teeth,” with a melodic structure reminiscent of grunge-gazers Narrow Head, focuses on missed connections and the difficulties of repair alongside what Dunnevant refers to as the “most powerful lyric” on Below: “Call me when you’ve settled/ Let’s catch up and make a plan/ I’ll pretend you understand and want to know.” “There’s certain situations with people who are so close to you that it’s hard to reconnect after one person wants to take a step back,” he explains while discussing the song’s thematic bent. “It’s about wanting to be successful with my art while also fighting with the fact that people around me have taken a more traditional route in life. I’m kind of jealous of that, but also fighting back against the ideology. That path they took worked out, which is a pretty big blessing, but I’ve also been working really hard with a full-time job and doing the band. The chorus is me asking to give me a reason to throw it all away— to go 9-to-5. It’s also a privilege to make art, so it’s a bit of an emotional juggle where I still feel bad about that, too.” Locating the emotional core of such complicated feelings is at the heart of Below, a record that finds its creator moving forward with his incredible sound while engaging in some serious reflection. “It is really interesting to listen to this record after time has passed,” Dunnevant says. “When I was writing it, I was pretty down about my trajectory, and I didn’t know what to do with my life. I decided to take a gamble on this record, and it ended up exactly what I wanted it to sound like. Every decision was correct.” After listening for yourself, you’d be hard-pressed not to agree.