Across its 11 tracks, Little Brain is a thoughtful and melancholic album wrestling with finding comfort in memory, identity and intimacy. The dense guitars and soft abrasion of the band’s shoegaze sound are grounded by the unique vocal interplay between Callan Dwan and Peter Mercer, whose harmonies blur into each other rather than compete. It’s a debut shaped by years of labor, where the intimacy of its lyrics meets the weight of everything the band poured into making it.
Written and recorded slowly between 2019 and 2025, the album grew out of fragments that existed even before the release of their 2019 EP Gates (Cold Lunch Recording). Early on, Bleary’s process revolved around writing songs, playing them live, and reshaping them in front of audiences. When the pandemic halted that rhythm, the band turned inward. Songs were passed back and forth as demos. A home recording setup built by Callan Dwan and Taro Yamazaki opened new doors, letting the band chase textures and arrangements that wouldn’t have been possible in a traditional rehearsal space. What started as necessity became a creative shift that defined the record.
The first recording sessions took place during peak COVID with Joshua Ditty, tracking the earliest completed songs. As writing continued and schedules filled with touring and outside projects, the rest of the album came together with Mike Purcell at County Q. Though the songs were compositionally finished before entering the studio, Bleary treated recording as part of the writing process, layering and experimenting relentlessly. The result is a dense, immersive album, with some tracks carrying dozens of guitar layers, built through patience and obsession.
Lyrically, Little Brain touches on the struggles of finding your place. Sometimes literally about that nagging feeling of guilt, of not being enough or the melancholy of forgetting a lost loved one. The themes are universal but articulated with melancholy eloquence throughout the record; a testament to the lyrical prowess of Dwan and Mercer. It can be heart heavy but never without a comforting familiarity.
Bleary's members are all active musicians outside the band, a reality that stretched Little Brain’s timeline but also sharpened it. Years spent touring and collaborating fed back into the songs, deepening the band’s usage of space and restraint. Little Brain emerges as an accumulation: ideas written on futons, reworked in bedrooms, expanded in studios, and refined quietly for years.
