Author: admin

When I listen to Tuxis Giant, a New York/Boston-based rock band which has been making exceptional music for over a decade, I enter a heightened affective state; I feel everything intensely. My first memory of this was in the spring of 2019 when I was driving through Wyoming on a solo tour through the Great Plains. As I sailed through the featureless green below the featureless blue, I listened to the second Tuxis full-length Here Comes the Wolf start to finish. By the end of the record, I felt like I was outside of my body, meandering slowly and without destination through the short grass like a breeze. At the same time, I felt so completely human and so unmistakably alive. I may have been crying.

Tuxis’s sound has developed since that record, owing both to lineup changes and to frontperson Matt O’Connor’s shifting tastes, but every subsequent release has had that special ability to reduce me to something elemental, some primordial emotional soup. Their latest release, You Won’t Remember This, is no exception.

Out 8/15/2025 on O’Connor’s own Worry Bead Records (do yourself a favor and check out their recent compilation True Names: A Benefit for Trans Youth if you haven’t already!), You Won’t Remember This is a relentlessly engaging, no-skips journey through the profound via the mundane.

Recorded at Wit’s End (a house in Wilmington, Vermont) with the inimitable engineer Nick Dussault of T-T)b, You Won’t Remember This features O’Connor’s long-time collaborator and Tuxis mainstay James Steinberg on drums, Eleanor Elektra Larsen (who has been with the band since 2022) on slide guitar and backing vocals, and live bassist Fenn Macon (who plays in about a hundred bands in Boston) making their recording debut with the band.

One especially strong feature of the album is the storytelling. O’Connor’s love and respect for the craft of writing comes through clearly in their ability to tell full-feeling stories without sacrificing economy of language. The album is brimming with sparsely worded sketches of life that introduce us to a familiar, quotidian world populated by relatable characters whose rich inner lives are assumed rather than stated. Take, for example, the opening lines from “Huey” (Karaoke at our favorite bar/I wanna sing away my cares/text me when you’re on the bus/I’ll order us a Ganssett pair) or “Reasons” (Everybody has a reason they cannot stay/Like I know I love you, but this is the only way).

These moments are like the scenes you sometimes stumble upon as you’re walking; you pause and people-watch for a while as the story unfolds in real time. Like any good writer, O’Connor trusts the listener to discern the complex and beautiful humanity in these simple scenes, the ways joy and agony and routine and comfort and boredom and confusion can all color a single moment in one’s life, and how any such moment can feel pregnant with meaning if given the spotlight. They know that we, the listeners, do not need our interpretive hands held.

Some of the songs accomplish this with more ambiguous language, such as “Last Laugh”: Got burned sitting in my usual perch/All I wanted was a warmth that’s endless/Now I feel it bad. Others lean more literal, like “Heart Surgery,” which contains some of my favorite lines in the record: At my mom’s open-heart surgery/They had the blood circulating outside her body/Most memories of that day are gone (x3)/But a few linger on/Like my dad cracking jokes/And my brother glued to his phone.

Woven into these sketches of the everyday and the literal are flashes of something fanciful, images that remind us that even our boring lives play out in a world where some enchantment may yet be lying in wait. Consider this example from “Silver Cup”:  It’s pretty easy to do, like flipping a light switch or changing your shoes/step into the purple mist and you come out different. The image of ‘the purple mist’ here conjures no familiar memory from my own life, but rather the kind of magical literary device you might find in a fairytale, that unusual fog at the edge of town that sometimes makes people…different. That world is our world too in You Won’t Remember This—or at least the veil between them is very thin. In another simple but effective illustration of this, “Days” opens with these memorable lines: At the end of the day/I put my apron away/And then at night/All the spirits come out to party.

As any Tuxis fan will rightly anticipate, the arrangements are full but lean; every part feels essential, enhancing the overall effect of the songs rather than serving as mere ornamentation. Eleanor Larsen’s harmonies in the opener “Simple Days” and the closer “What’s Going On In Your Mind” are absolutely arresting; her slide guitar parts, which vary from buoyant and playful noodling in “Family Funeral” to a subtle but effective call-and-response interplay with O’Connor’s voice in “Heart Surgery,” add emotional heft and character throughout; Steinberg’s drums anchor an irresistible, full-body groove in “Days” and drive the deeply satisfying, straight up rock and roll banger “Last Laugh”; Fenn Macon’s perfect  bassline in “Reasons” carries the song, as does their shared run with Larsen’s guitar in the upbeat section of “Trying to Be Numb,” while their gentle accompaniment in “Holy Water” glues the other parts together beautifully; O’Connor demonstrates an impressive range as a vocalist and guitarist across the entire record, wearing their years of experience with the unmistakable comfort of true mastery.

By the end of the record, I feel smashed to pieces and reassembled, certain of both the tenderness and vulnerability of living and the fact that all of us can marshal the quiet dignity needed to navigate life. Despite its title, You Won’t Remember This is a singularly memorable record, one I know I’ll return to time and again when I need to reconnect with these basic human truths.