B-Side Guys

MEMORIALS—Electrelane’s Verity Susman and Wire’s Matthew Simms—recorded “Cut Glass Hammer” as an experiment in not changing chords. Two constantly evolving modular synth lines rotate around each other while Susman sings lyrics inspired by visiting Yoko Ono’s Music of the Mind retrospective at London’s Tate Modern. The result sounds less like homage and more like the feeling of being trapped inside a gallery after closing, watching art rearrange itself when no one’s looking.

What Is “Cut Glass Hammer” About?

The song obsesses over instability disguised as structure. “Nothing is exactly as it feels” repeats like a mantra, while images accumulate without resolving: abandoned metronomes, rotating ruins, shadows of cats high on walls, roundabouts circling monuments. Everything suggests motion without progress, the kind of circular anxiety that comes from realizing your perception can’t be trusted. The title object—a cut glass hammer—is beautiful and useless, decorative violence that “waits to break the ice” but probably can’t.

Recorded in a barn studio deep in southwestern France, the duo committed to analog choices that force capturing moments rather than endless tinkering. They tracked the harpsichord at 4AD’s London studio and the vibraphone at Stereolab drummer Andy Ramsay’s Press Play studio, actively turning away from easy options. You can hear that deliberate limitation in how the song refuses to give you the chord change your ear expects, trapping you in its gravitational pull.

The lyrics mention stopping still to watch the stars while roundabouts circle monuments, which captures the strange paralysis of trying to find meaning in systems designed to keep you moving. The waves break, the trees shake, the clock ticks, and you can’t escape. Nothing is exactly as it feels, but the cut glass hammer keeps waiting to break ice that may not exist.

---

Enjoy this track? Check out Forgotten Garden.