Krill – Commemorative Plaque
Krill are back, and “Commemorative Plaque” is their first newly recorded song in a decade. The Boston DIY trio formed in 2010, put out three albums in five years, and broke up in 2015 in that classic way where a band just stops mid-groove without anyone quite explaining why. They resurfaced briefly to play LVL UP’s final show, then folded into a new project called Knot with all three original members, releasing a self-titled LP in 2020 that’s since been folded back into the Krill catalog. Now they’re Krill again, with Jonah Furman and Ian Becker joined by new guitarist Andrew Clinkman (Moontype, Spirits Having Fun).
The song itself sounds like classic Krill: drawling vocals, spiky, intricate guitar work, a mood that stays oblique. Macie Stewart (of Finom) adds violin and Will Greene (Tredici Bacci, Trigger) plays saxophone, filling out a track that Furman has described as a companion piece to the older song “Oppressor,” another song about coming home. Talking about it, he called home “a place and a person and an inside joke,” which is about as concise a summary of the whole thing as you could ask for.
What gets me is how specific the song stays without ever spelling anything out directly. There’s a father’s old Aretha Franklin CD playing on quiet Sunday mornings, an inside joke whose punchline turns out to be a person rather than a line, and a closing image about wanting something physical to mark how much all of it mattered. It’s nostalgic without tipping into sentimentality, which is a hard balance to strike.
