Runnner with Pleasure Systems

Runnner’s sophomore full-length, A Welcome Kind of Weakness, emerged from a simultaneous tear in songwriter Noah Weinman’s body and life. Written during the months spent bedridden and healing from a torn achilles and the drastic upheaval of a breakup, the 11 songs on this record are Weinman’s most bracing, inviting the perceived vulnerability of the album’s title willingly. But at the same time, these songs are Runnner’s most present, defiant and self-assured, a reminder of the resolve that can come from gracefully accepting submission.

Longtime fans of Weinman’s likely fell for his signature homespun indie rock, recorded almost exclusively in bedrooms and home studios, where his poignant and self-deprecating lyrics float over beds of banjos, guitars and reverberant horns crescendoing to cathartic peaks. But on A Welcome Kind of Weakness, Weinman soars for the first time in high fidelity. Runnner’s first studio record, it recalls the larger-than-life highs of the early aughts rock that Weinman grew up on, bands like Coldplay, Radiohead, and Snow Patrol with their pristine vocal presence, scintillating guitar riffs, and astral synth sparkle. This is rock music in its most delicious form, music that gave Weinman something to look forward to when he could finally play live again.

But as high as the sonic highs may be on A Welcome Kind of Weakness, we also see Weinman struggling gracefully with the questions that emerge from moments of physical and emotional undoing. As he sings about spackling holes in the house he shared with his ex and reckoning with a long span of physical futility, we’re reminded, too, of all the spectrums of experience we endure. We are all perpetually pulled between polls—weakness/resolve, nostalgia/presence, powerlessness/control—but it takes a certain bravery to sit in the murky middle long enough to write about it. And in his willingness to bear witness to that transitory space, Weinman seems to reassure us: You may think you won’t run again, but, given time, you might.

On Pleasure Systems’ latest album, Leave It in the Sand, Clarke Sondermann tenses and relaxes to the music. The all-encompassing depression of his debut has given way to a much broader and more open-hearted perspective. Sadness is still a texture of life but one that butts up against everyday happiness and worldly anxiety. And other people! Working alongside an all-star cast of collaborators with legendary DJ and producer Ivan Berko at the helm, Sondermann widens his scope and amplifies his sound. On a scale that’s both bedroom intimate and compositionally vast, Sondermann navigates the straits between an over-active life of the mind and being present and attuned to his loved ones while he still has them.

Pleasure Systems works in the tradition of Ed Askew, Lavender Country, Nicholas Krgovich, and Rufus Wainwright, singer-songwriters who’ve captured the texture of gay life with detail that’s as funny and precise as it is heartbreaking. Like any young, doom-scrolling New Yorker, Sondermann’s rich inner life plays out against a constant, ambient thrum of minor annoyances, headline making horrors, and sudden, blink-or-miss-it epiphanies.