It’s fitting that when Dimitri Giannopoulos calls me to discuss Horse Jumper of Love’s latest album, Disaster Trick, he’s outside the monolithic store Whole Foods. He’s taking a moment before stocking up on fruits and vegetables, preparing for their tour opening for DIIV. The singer-guitarist has spent more than a decade with drummer James Doran and bassist John Margaris, and Horse Jumper of Love are clearly hitting their stride.
“It’s good for the longevity of the band to just be healthy,” he says. “We were all talking about this yesterday because, actually, there’s three of us in the band now who don’t drink. How the hell did we do those tours drinking so much? Looking back, [it] seems impossible the amount we were drinking while on the road and while trying to perform every night.
“Also drinking every day for six weeks straight, it gets you sick. I feel healthier. After doing a couple [of] sober tours, I don’t think I could ever go back to not doing that,” he adds with a laugh.
Disaster Trick, their follow-up to last year’s Heartbreak Rules, looks back on disastrous habits, making space newfound clarity. “I think probably everyone has points in their life when they go through a chaotic or destructive period,” Giannopoulos says. “This album was me coming out of that and processing it. I think it all ties into sobriety and shit like that. It was me trying to become”—he glances to the side, grinning with a soft laugh—“an adult or something.”
For Giannopoulos, songwriting is a form of self-excavation, even if its meaning isn’t immediately clear. “Sometimes when I look back at [lyrics], it doesn’t even feel like me. But I think that’s like the goal of songwriting is to become outside of yourself in a way. It feels like a key to figuring out your emotional state.”
Horse Jumper of Love has always been a venue for creative freedom, but this album represents their most intentional work yet. “I start feeling insane if I’m not creating anything, so I have to constantly be doing it. Even if it’s bad shit, I have to do it. I don’t really care; I’ll just put out whatever I have. And that feels really liberating,” he says. Well, until it’s not: “It can be an issue when I don’t have the project or album fully realized. I have these songs and need to get them out because I feel antsy. I don’t give myself enough time to think and filter and process what I actually created.”
Disaster Trick diverges from the approach of simply releasing songs. This album is more personal than Giannopoulos’ previous work, where, as he puts it, “I will have a random thought about some bullshit, and I’ll write a song about it.” This shift in approach isn’t the only change. HJOL worked with close friend Bradford Krieger for the past four albums at Rhode Island’s Big Nice Studio, fitting in recording time between day jobs and touring. For Disaster Trick, they worked with producer Alex Farrar at Drop of Sun Studios in Asheville, North Carolina for a couple weeks in August 2023.
Giannopoulos describes the sense of validation from this new creative environment. “It did give me this sense of legitimacy of being like, ‘Oh, cool. My job right now is to record.’ It felt real,” he says. “We were living in the album for two weeks, and I think that really came through.” The Asheville sessions also included contributions from local friends Karly Hartzman and Jake Lenderman of Wednesday, who added vocal and guitar embellishments. Squirrel Flower’s Ella O’Connor Williams lent her vocals to “Lip Reader,” a song she and Giannopoulos performed together nightly on a solo tour.
“Lip Reader” is one of many tracks where intimacy and distance feel tethered like a tin can telephone. “I could see you from the other room / Like a lip reader from the other side / You’re from another side,” he sings with a gentle heaviness, O’Connor Williams’ vocals trailing like a sidewalk shadow. With sludgy guitars and patient drums, it’s a devastating waltz built on ambiguous tension: Is this a cry for closeness or an admission of space? Disaster Trick plays with space literally and metaphorically, chipping away at the distances we all explore to escape the understanding of self-origins, to find evolve our nature, and learn how connecting with others reconciles the two.
“The thought behind ‘disaster trick’ was you’re tricking people all the time. You’re putting up a fake whatever, however you present yourself to society. And then sometimes it’s a disaster and you crumble and then people see who you truly are. That was the concept behind that line,” he says of the album’s title, a lyric from the uneasy lead single “Wink.” But that wasn’t the project’s initial name, changing course a week before finalizing the artwork. “The original title was going to be one of the lyrics in the song ‘Word,’ the final lyric of that song: ‘Our worlds beyond this world.’ And I thought that was too long and too dramatic. Honestly, I just thought it sounded a little cooler,” he laughs.
The album’s core theme revolves around the thorny relationship between perception and connection—self-imposed remoteness versus a desire for intimacy. On “Death Spiral,” the most somber and magnetizing track, Giannopoulos combines a Joni Mitchell lyric with imagery of a dangerous mating ritual. “Love’s defined: ‘Touching Souls’ / Joni Mitchell / On that hill / You found yourself / Witnessing 2 eagles / In death spiral,” he sings. It beautifully captures the dark nature of love, attracting people as we showcase and fight our way through risky behaviors. It can either be romantic or tragic (or both) to see whether that connection lasts.
“There’s definitely a lot about distance and disconnect with people. Even disconnection with people you truly love,” he says of the album. “[Death Spiral] is about someone that I really love and that I felt like I was growing distant with, physically because I’m on the road and emotionally because I was just going through a bad time in my life. A lot of the songs have that theme of having trouble connecting with people because, for me, it comes as a result of the lifestyle I’ve chosen which is like touring and writing music.”
Talking about Disaster Trick feels like a meta ouroboros—songwriting that reflects Giannopoulos’ focus but also feeds into a cycle of balancing work, creativity, and personal life. “A lot of people that I know have jobs where they can take a break or a vacation and do stuff with the people they love. In the past few years, as I’ve gotten busy with Horse Jumper, it’s been difficult to create memories and good times with people I love because I’m always so far away. And then I come home and become distant because I need space to myself. I don’t get that on the road.”
The creative lifestyle affects one’s ability to connect, a realization that’s both strange and revealing. While the art he creates can forge deeper connections, the touring lifestyle depletes his social battery.
“I don’t want to sound like a baby, but it’s really exhausting,” he says, earnestly, of touring and recording. “I’ve been doing it for like 10 years now with relatively not much to show for it. I don’t feel like a successful musician. I can’t necessarily pay my rent by doing this. I still have to do other stuff. The spare time I have beyond this and working is so valuable to me. I feel like it’s going by so fast, and I don’t want to look back and think, ‘Wow, I spent all my time doing not what I wanted to do.’” He hears this tension in the new music. “When I listen back to the songs, there’s also some paranoia about time going on and not being present. Everything is just passing by.”
Disaster Trick stands as Horse Jumper of Love’s most emotionally resonant album, marked by numerous firsts. Yet it doesn’t offer all the answers to the deep revelations that inspired it. “It’s not like I did the album and I figured it out. I felt like doing the album and getting those feelings out is literally the very first step for me,” Giannopoulos says about finding balance. “Songwriting is the only place in my life where that comes out. It feels like a funny little message to yourself.”
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