In Conversation: Ned Russin of Glitterer
For over a decade now, Ned Russin has played a major part in reimagining the sound of modern hardcore. Just don't call him an "elder statesman."
He was only 21 years old when we first met in 2012, but I saw Ned Russin as a peer from our first conversation. Ned was insanely creative, enthusiastic, and well-versed enough in hardcore history to be called scholarly about it; when GQ asked him to talk about his vintage hardcore t-shirt collection a few years later, it was obvious that Ned was more excited to talk about Beyond and Judge than he was to talk to America’s premier men’s fashion magazine. He’s always just done his own thing with a level of detachment about the result, and that’s part of what’s makes him such a vital artist.
Much has happened in the intervening ten years—not the least of which includes the frantic rise and abrupt hiatus of Title Fight, followed by the formation of the equally visceral Glitterer—but Ned’s devotion to music, hardcore culture, and figuring out the best way to live is still at the core of his pursuits. He can be frustratingly modest at times, but the one thing I can say about Ned, as a friend and a fan, is that he always moves forward with his heart in the right in the place.
I want to go back to 2016, but I don't wanna do it in the way that people would sort of like me to do it. What I want to talk about is how the Glitterer story starts with Title Fight’s ambiguous ending. In terms of being here seven years later, how does that ambiguity sit with you?
NED: I think it sits with me just fine. I think a lot of other people have a lot of problems with it, but it doesn't bother me. One thing that I’ve really tried to adapt to in the more recent years is the idea of not subscribing to any sort of binary, which means the idea of a band existing or not existing is not so important to me anymore. I used to fight back against the definitions or the language that people tried to put on the band—like, we’ve never said “hiatus,” we’ve never said “broken up,” we’ve never said any of those words. These are words that have been put on us, but it’s not anything we’ve ever said ourselves so, like, everything is a misconception.
Was that ambiguity deliberate? Or just something that developed along the way?
NED: I mean, yes and no. It’s complicated, as you can imagine. Part of it, I think, is that “the big breakup” is just something I do not care to be a part of, but it’s also something that doesn’t really exist anymore. There is a chance that any band will play again, no matter what. It doesn’t matter if everyone hates each other; it doesn’t even matter if people have passed away. The bands will find a way to make things work if they want to and that’s totally fine. I get that 100-percent “yes” or 100-percent “no” is a thing people want to hear, but then also as soon as you give one of those answers, people start pestering you—like, “Oh, what will it take for you to do this”—and that’s also a thing I’m not interested in.
So has there ever been a point in the last seven years where you have felt uneasy about it? Or have you really always been completely, like, “No problem, this is cool.”
NED: Yeah, of course, I’ve felt uneasy. I’m a human. I have felt so many different complicated feelings towards this subject. I felt like I practiced acceptance. I felt completely out of control and spiraled into weird bouts of depression over it. I’ve felt so many different things. I don’t know. Like, I read what you write. I read what you said about not wanting to be defined by your band, or not wanting to be “Norman from Texas is the Reason,” and I felt all those things at the same time. I don’t know that it’s something I struggle with, but at the same time, it’s something that’s there, you know? Some days I’m better at dealing with it than others.
I think you and I both share something in the way that we did these bands when we were at very formative ages. Like, how old were you when the band stopped playing?
NED: We stopped touring in 2016. We played shows in 2017, and then the last show we played was in 2018. So we entered a state of not knowing what was going to happen in late 2016. I was 26 years old, and I had been doing that thing since I was twelve.
I feel like when we first met, there was already some sort of psychological friction you had about being that age and being in a band because it was already something you’d done for so long. I read an interview from not too long ago where you talked about going to Columbia University as a way to see if there was something else you could do besides music, but you were talking to me about going back to school way before that, maybe in 2015.
NED: That’s definitely something we talked about. I think [Title Fight was] pretty self-aware, and we were coming up in an era where a lot of “career bands” were starting to falter, where they stopped being able to play the big rooms they were playing five or ten years earlier. So the idea of being “a professional musician,” in the way of paying your rent by playing music, that idea was quickly evaporating to us—and we were nineteen years old, you know?
A lot of that didn’t matter to us because we dropped out of college and moved back in with our parents and it was fine. But we kind of felt like we had a two-year window to figure out if we could make it work. It ended up becoming something that was sustainable, but we were well aware that it could be taken away at any minute. So part of me wanted to just engage my brain. For me, touring was like, I literally just stare at the road all day and then I load heavy equipment and then I play music for thirty minutes and you have the typical van conversations, like, “Man, wouldn’t it be crazy if aliens were real?” [laughs]. I think I just needed some more, I don’t know, intellectual engagement. That’s why I went back to community college when I was 22. I did courses online while we were on tour.
And then that turned into being in your mid-twenties, which was a weird time for me personally, and also for societal and familial pressure that wasn’t even there, but that I felt. So I just thought, if the band stuff isn’t permanent, if all of these things are going to fall apart any moment—and not even out of our own doing—then I need to have something I can transition to after music. Looking back on it, it’s such a funny thing to believe. Or at least I think so?
Ten years later, it’s not a thing I’m worried about now. I’m perfectly content with the choices that I’ve made and the choices I continue to make to play music and to live this kind of lifestyle. But it felt so drastic at that time, I had no choice but to be anxious.
How much, if anything, do you think having two hardcore brothers plays a role in your need to differentiate?
NED: I don't know. It’s a really hard question for me because I don’t know anything else. You know, a lot of my life and a lot of my life choices have been built off of differentiating myself. The reason why I play bass is because Alex plays guitar. I was ten years old. I wanted to start playing music, I wanted to be in a band, I wanted to do all these things. But I can't play guitar because Alex already does it. And that will look stupid that I will be, you know, following in his footsteps, so I have to do my own thing. I originally tried to play drums, but Ben was like, “I’m playing drums, you can’t do that.” OK, then there's only one option. I’ll play the bass. Beyond that, I’ve always been somewhat antagonistic in that regard.
Having Alex around put you in a position where you discovered hardcore insanely early.
NED: Alex is seven years older than Ben and me. He was getting into hardcore when he was 14 or 15. So we were seven years old—not like we were Freddy Madball; we weren’t singing songs on stage with him. But there’s this joke amongst my friends that I was straight edge when I was seven years old. It’s an absurd thing, and I know that, but I asked Alex what it was and he told me, I was like, “That’s cool. I like that. Me too, I’m straight edge.” So part of me, I think, is that a lot of my worldview was built from a young age. The things that hardcore has exposed me to, and the ideologies that it fostered in myself, are just a disinterest in mainstream culture to a sometimes unhealthy extent. It’s just the idea that we are able to do anything we want to do, when we want to do it, and how we want to do it, with no one’s permission.
I don’t think of myself as a particularly go-getter kind of person, you know? In the jobs that I’ve had or the academic pursuits that I’ve had, I’ve never thought, “I’m going to go the farthest and be the best and change things!” I don’t have that personality. But within music, I feel so passionately about it that I have attempted to do those things. And I think hardcore has given me that opportunity.
You talked about having a disinterest in mainstream culture, almost to a point where it can be “unhealthy,” and I’m wondering if you can think of an example of that in your life where you sort of had to check yourself a little bit.
NED: I didn’t like the Beatles for a long time. That’s a stupid example, but when I got into hardcore, my parents liked the Beatles. Hardcore was supposed to anti-whatever that is, so I was like, “I don’t like that” [laughs]. There are a lot of stupid examples like that, where I just don’t like popular things. But honestly, I think the pandemic made me check a lot of this at the door. I was having this conversation yesterday about how I don’t think music should be fun—which is a complicated opinion. I just think music is too important. I think there are things we should discuss and things we should feel in hardcore or underground music as a whole that are beyond fun. It shouldn’t just be about hanging out with your buddies and having a good time and feeling uplifted by the music. It’s like, no. We should be working towards the greater good.
But in the pandemic, I kind of realized there is nothing wrong with going to a show and just being like, “I enjoy this. This is nice” [laughs]. Everybody needs whatever they need out of music, out of their creative outlet or their hobbies. Who am I to say that this is what you should take away from it? That’s ridiculous.
There have certainly been bands and movements in hardcore that I would say have been joyless.
NED: Yeah.
And I don’t feel like I wanna revisit those things.
NED: I don’t want to revisit the joylessness. But the thing is, as I get older, I look at bands like Fugazi as the pinnacle of what I want to do. I know that they had a lot of fun, that they were actually friends, that they did cool stuff on tour. But when they played the music, it was deadly serious. All the lights were on. If you did something that they found to be inappropriate, they would call you on it. I think there’s a way to have a balance.
It’s just funny that you say that though, because I would argue that there were these very clear binaries with Fugazi—that Fugazi was almost a walking binary.
NED: Yeah [laughs].
I also sometimes wonder if you were able to plant Fugazi into the middle of now, and they were doing these things where they were calling you out at a show, would people just post videos of that to TikTok and be like, “Shut up, you fucking cop” [laughs].
NED: I mean, they kind of show that in Instrument. Like, people are really upset about it. But I think today would be a completely different situation because of the way that you can interact with it from afar. You could have that opinion from the safety of your home and not have to go see them, whereas before you had to go to the show to be yelled at and then sit in the parking lot and talk to Jem Cohen and be like, “Man, that band fucking sucks now” [laughs]. It’s all just such a different timeline now. People are very quick to point out things they don’t like.
As someone who also went back to school as an adult, I remember that when I was in grad school, I became a little bit insufferable in terms of this desire to theorize everything—because sometimes when you do that, you lose the sense of just feeling something or letting something be. On some level, I feel like some of what you’re talking about here is kind of theory-esque, so I’m sort of like, oh, is this left over from academia?
NED: Yeah. My brother Harry, he’s an academic. He finished his Ph.D. a couple of years ago and he’s teaching now. He’s the real deal. I’ve spoken with him about it and he’s like, “Academics are the worst because they’ve been in school their entire lives and they’ve never learned how to socialize beyond that world. And so their entire understanding of how the world works is that school is the only important thing and all these things that we’re teaching and discussing—that’s what’s important in the world.” That’s not exclusive to academia—a lot of people in their pursuits think what they’re doing is the only thing that matters—but school is interesting because it’s a thing built for young people. So your opinions and attitudes on things are built around interacting with mostly immature people for extended periods of time, you know? I understood that, and I realized I fell into that trap a little bit. It was a good experience, but I was definitely saying things like, “Oh, this is so similar to what Foucault said!” Or, “Oh, the way hardcore works is just like what Lacan said about the mirror. I see how it’s applicable to this now!” [laughs] Those things only serve you to a certain point.
When I was writing that essay, “Your Band Could Be Your Life,” I actually almost dropped a theorist in there, but I didn’t. I still think it’s relevant. I don’t know if you’ve ever read Louis Althusser.
NED: No, I haven’t.
He’s a Marxist philosopher, who was well-known for this concept of “interpellation.” The trademark example he gives is when the cop on the street calls out, “Hey you!” and you turn around, you’ve been established as a subject. He also calls it “hailing,” meaning that someone hails you in some way, and you stop and acknowledge that hailing, you then become the subject—your identity in that transaction is established. This is heady [laughs]. But in that essay, I was essentially talking about how I’d constantly identify with “Norm from Texas is the Reason” every time someone hailed me in that way, and how it kind of fucks with your head because you sort of lose agency in your own identity formation. I don’t know how well I’m explaining that, but based on what you’re hearing, can you think of a situation where you felt hailed?
NED: I think the easiest example would be the way people talk to me about their loved ones passing away because of the song “27”… but the thing is, my dad is alive. He had a series of health problems when I was younger. He had cancer, triple bypass surgery, and a couple of smaller things all at the same time, and this happened very quickly. It was an especially traumatic moment for a teenager. But there’s a moment in triple bypass surgery where you are essentially dead, they do whatever work they do, and then they bring you back. I could be completely wrong, but this is how it was explained to me as a kid and this is how I still remember it. So that song was about that.
I was a sophomore or junior in high school when it happened, so I took the day off from school with my brothers. We went down and sat in the waiting room while our dad died and came back to life and then drove back home to go back to school and be a normal kid after that. Obviously, it’s very easy to take away from that song that my dad never came back. So many people have come up to me since and say, “Hey, that song ‘27’ got me through some stuff,” or have even apologized to me for the loss of my dad, and… like, I’m not here to correct them, you know? I just accept that and have the conversation as best I can. But that's not what happened. My dad loves it though. He used to come see us in Philly and be like, “Everybody thinks I’m dead. That’s cool!”
OK, we kind of mangled interpellation, but you’ve basically been hailed as an orphan.
NED: Yeah [laughs].
When I think of the last several years for you, I do see you pretty engaged in solitary pursuits—going back to school, writing a novel, even starting Glitterer, which at least in the beginning, was really you. After growing up in this big family and doing Title Fight, it feels like you’re in “Ned’s Alone Era.”
NED: I’ve been trying to dig myself out of that hole for like two years now. When I started Glitterer, I was in school and it was after a long-term relationship ended, so I was very much like, “This is all I have, so I’m just going to go through this myself.” It was a conscious decision to present these things as a solitary act, and it was a very fine line to walk. I used to always push back when people called Glitterer a solo project, because to me that defines it as the essence of my being that I’m presenting—and that wasn’t the goal. It was never like, “This is Ned Russin at his most vulnerable!” It was more, this is a band, but right now it just happens to be me. I actually thought it was beneficial at the time, because the original Glitterer songs had a lot to do with loneliness and my attempts to reconcile my own solipsism, or—thinking in a heady, whatever fucking dumb-guy-goes-to-college-once kind of way—by asking how have these selfish, lonely, solipsistic thoughts brought us to the current moment? Because the current moment at that time was the Trump election and police brutality, and in my mind, there was a large link between individual selfishness and cultural selfishness that had driven us to that point. I thought there might be a really interesting point to be driven home here by the fact that this is just one person doing this, singing about these lonely, selfish things. And then COVID hits.
I finished writing Life is Not a Lesson during the pandemic, by myself. Recorded in a practice space, by myself. And then it was like, this is too much. Singing about being lonely while I’m actually lonely is driving me insane. And I cannot continue to do this and force myself to go on tour like that—literally just getting in a car by myself and driving around the country with no accompaniment. After two years of forced isolation, I knew I couldn’t do it anymore. Since then, it’s just been trying to have the band be a band. And it’s a unit now, a cohesive group of people who are collaborating and doing the things that actual bands do.
I do think you’re right about the way that individual selfishness leads to cultural selfishness—where everything is just me, me, me, me. Were you starting to feel like, oh my God, I don’t want this to be about me all the time?
NED: I don’t know. Because the thing is that Glitterer is not something I’ve had to worry about so much because it has not had the same pressures as Title Fight. Part of that has been very beneficial because the stakes are lower, but it’s also something I’ve had to grapple with—that thing of, like, people are not talking about this and feeling a certain way about this in the same regard that they were before. I’m just doing these things because this is what I want to do… This is a tough question.
In my mind there was some sort of break between Glitterer and myself—in a way that I didn’t feel with Title Fight for some reason. To repeat what I said earlier, this is not a solo project. These are not my deepest, darkest thoughts or the entire representation of my entire being. Maybe for some reason with Title Fight, there was an acceptance of the hailing. Maybe people have been saying “Ned from Title Fight” so often that I’ve just become that. But I feel much less pressure with Glitterer to be what people want me to be. And that’s been very… “liberating” feels like too strong a word, but it’s felt nice to not have to feel like I owe anyone anything.
I was thinking about how Thursday played This is Hardcore last year, and how in the weeks leading up to the show, my inner critic kept saying things to me like, “Do they want us there?” [both laugh] And of course we played the show and it was amazing and it was super fun and everyone had a great time—joyful, even. After the show was over, I just remember feeling like, why do I always do that myself? Why do I always feel like less-than or like I’m an outsider—even when I am fully inside of my element? So I was watching a video of Glitterer playing at Sound and Fury this year, and people were stage-diving and having fun and it looked like a good, joyful time. But I wondered if you still get those feelings, too.
NED: I think that so much of hardcore is that feeling. And it’s such an interesting thing because hardcore is a very large community at this point that extends many different barriers. But so many people I’ve talked to and so many of my own feelings have been, “I come here because I don’t fit in other places.” That’s my understanding of a lot of people’s origin stories. But there’s still something about that where, even among the freaks and the weirdos, it’s still hard to find that sense of belonging. So yeah, I still very much feel that way. Not so much on a sonic level—like, “Oh, our band sounds different,” because yeah, we do. But like, even at Sound and Fury, I felt a little lonely at times. I’m there with however many thousands of people, and we probably have a lot of the same interests and share a lot of the same ideas, but whether it’s something as big as Sound and Fury or something as big as a show that Glitterer plays to 50 or 100 people, I still find myself feeling that way.
It is weird because, what you were saying about hardcore is true—about how this is the place where we are supposed to feel most comfortable. And that’s still true for me. But I’ve also felt uncomfortable at a lot of hardcore shows in my life. Where does that come from?
NED: I don’t know! I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because, well… I don’t feel like an “old person.” I don’t feel like an “elder statesman.” But I am not the young person driving the thing anymore. I’m not the one who is a part of the generation who are making the important changes in the community. And so I’m sitting here in my own place, kind of feeling like I don’t belong to that group anymore. I have all these ideas about how hardcore could be its best self or something, but I feel like, one, nobody agrees with me. Two, nobody gives a shit. And three, at the end of the day, I think that the scene at large—and especially the current crop of new bands who are driving things—whatever they decide, that’s what’s going to happen.
Why would you assume no one gives a shit?
NED: I don’t know. I mean, I feel like everybody’s opinion and everybody’s ideas matter to the extent that everyone should feel validated. But in this era that we live in, where people are just constantly bombarding you with their opinions, I don’t feel the need to jump in and join the conversation. I’ve always been the kind of person where if anyone wants to ask me something, I’m happy to share my opinion. But I’m not going to put myself out there. I don’t feel like I’d ever comment on, like, “Hey, here are my opinions on the state of the scene.”
You say you don’t see yourself as an “elder statesman”—and OK, that’s cool. You don’t have to see yourself that way. But the fact is also that… Well, I’ll just say this: There are a lot of bands out right now that sound like Title Fight.
NED: No comment [laughs].
I’m not naming names! I’m just saying that maybe your influence is still acknowledged.
NED: Perhaps. But this is how I think of it: Title Fight was immensely influenced by Texas is the Reason…
[Laughs] …Oh, don’t pull this!
NED: No, no, no, no. I am gonna pull this! The reason why the first 7-inch is three songs and the way it’s laid out is because we were ripping off Texas is the Reason.
OK, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that you created this body of work that’s really singular and really influential. And what’s even more interesting to me is that, even if you look at Floral Green and Hyperview, I feel like you’ve created two lines of influence that have been really interesting to watch over the years.
NED: I’m not trying to say that we put ourselves behind you guys or the other bands that we were influenced by or something. The point I’m trying to make is that we looked at your bands and many other bands that we thought were so important and so cool, and we attempted to emulate what you guys did through our own interpretation. For myself, I think looking up to your generation of musicians and bands and stuff, we just took so much away from that—from just observing it and putting our own thing on it.
So to me, that’s the way I try to be an “elder statesman” or something. It’s by saying there’s been a lot of thought into everything Title Fight did and everything Glitterer continues to do, and if you want to know what we think is the “right” way to do things, just look at how we did it. I don’t want to come out and say, “Hey, if you’re going to make shirts, price them fairly. If you’re going to play music, play it hard.” I don’t want to have to be like, “Here is a handbook on how I think things should be done.” I’d like to think it’s there. It’s written on the page, in invisible ink, and you just gotta figure it out.
All right, I'm gonna ask you one more thing, and I want you to think hard.
NED: OK… [laughs].
I want you to tell me something very banal about yourself that you think says the most about who you are.
NED: This is really hard!
You can take some time with it.
NED: [Pauses] All right, here’s a thing. I’m thinking about this because I just did this, but I live on the fourth floor of a building. The mailboxes are obviously all on the first floor. I refuse to have the mailbox key on my keyring, which I keep on my person at all times. So I walk up to my apartment, let myself in, get the mailbox key, walk all the way back down to check the mail, and there’s usually nothing there, only to walk back up [laughs].
OK, break this down for me.
NED: I like to do things in an annoying, difficult way. Part of it is aesthetic—like, I hate having a lot of keys on my keyring—but also part of it is just a quirk or something. It’s like, this is a thing I’ve committed myself to doing. “Loyalty” is the wrong word to use for this thing, but I think I’m very committed to my asinine opinions, and once I make a decision, it’s just how I do things. It’s very annoying! When I walk in the building with my girlfriend, and she has her mailbox key on her keyring, and I ask her if she’ll check the mail for me, she says, “No. Put the mailbox key on your ring and do it yourself.” And I say, “OK, I’ll just walk up the stairs and walk back down and I’ll check it in five minutes” [laughs].
So where do you leave room for evolution?
NED: I get told I’m a stubborn person a lot, which relates to what I just said. But I’d also like to think I’m fairly open-minded and accepting of change. I try to evolve and I try to open myself up to new ideas. It’s a little difficult because there are certain things I’m very steadfast about. But I just want to continue and try to be a better person. That’s the corniest, dumbest, most cliche thing you could say.
But with the keyring thing, you seem to take this weird, perverse pleasure in it [laughs].
NED: A little bit [laughs]. Yeah, I like being difficult. And a lot of it is trying to figure out, why do I get off on this? I think a lot of this is attached to the reason why I really got into hardcore and why I really threw myself into that. It was a place where you had to kind of be annoying. Now is a very different time. Before, it wasn’t like, “I want to see this band so I’m going to go online, get on their mailing list, and get the advanced tickets when they go on sale,” or whatever. I kind of liked it when you had to find the flyer and go to the show and put in the work—and not in a “proving” kind of way, where you have to struggle because others before you have struggled. I think that’s bullshit…
…But I think what you’re saying is you enjoy that struggle. Like, the mail key is a struggle for you, but that’s where the pleasure is.
NED: Yeah, I think that’s right. I think it’s worth it to do something the way you want to do it, even if it’s annoying.
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Title Fight happened in a time where I was fully disconnected from hardcore and Glitterer (as Ned alone) was one of the first bands I saw when I came back into it.
I had a visceral reaction to it where I both did not enjoy the band and knew there was something real to appreciate in it. This interview really captures that for me, there is thoughtfulness and intentionality that seems inherent to how Ned interacts with the world that pulls me in.
I loved how many little anecdotes of making a choice and accepting the consequences of those choices ran through this (literally the beginning and end, from rejecting the false binary of broken up or not broken up to the mail key).
Great writing. I loved this. Met Ned in pdx last year, nicest dude. Thanks for sharing.