Peter Gill is the guitarist in Friendship, but his own songs are quite a bit peppier than Dan Wriggins' material. Gill leads 2nd Grade, a band that has spent this decade cranking out consistently delightful power-pop albums. The last two, 2022's Easy Listening and 2024's Scheduled Explosions, came out on Double Double Whammy. Today Gill and bandmates Catherine Dwyer, Lucas Knapp, and Michael Cormier-O'Leary are back to reveal their new label affiliation.
Starting with today's new single, 2nd Grade will now release music for Lame-O Records, an indie institution in the band's Philadelphia hometown. The new song, an anxiously upbeat and catchy number called "Cellophane Girls," is a '60s throwback in multiple senses, as Gill explains:
With "Cellophane Girls" I wanted to write something like a six verse Bob Dylan ballad crammed into the space of a two-and-a-half-minute pop song, a loose tale full of finger-pointing and playful tangents and obscure pathos. It’s meant to come across as pretty open ended. To me it’s a song of empathy, about how hard it is to find your place in the world.
Listen below.
