Releases October 23rd, 2026 **Bundle includes signed LP & a hand engraved ring by Grumpy!** 1. Unfindable Ring2. OBL3. yr bitch4. Football Tour5. Answers6. The Whale (ft. D.A. Crimson)7. Last of Your Kind8. WTF9. George Clanton10. Cool Ranch11. Solicitors' Rights12. Twenty Five13. Queens ----- The comfort of kids’ hidden object games––iSpy, Where’s Waldo, a carnival treasure dig––is that the thing you’re searching for really does exist, and you’ll find it, should you only try hard enough. Not quite so as we get older. The more we learn, the more we realize the coveted loot isn’t always within reach. It might not exist at all. The Golden Fleece, the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail. For Grumpy, this is the “Unfindable Ring.” The record opens with a confession, an appraisal of his work until now: “I dive for an unfindable ring,” Grumpy’s Heaven Schmitt sings on the title track, “a grand gesture type thing / that doesn’t have the effect I hoped for.” Schmitt––and thus his alter ego Grumpy––is a guy of Big Romance, the sweeping, theatrical stunt, chivalry and pomp, thorned rose stem between his teeth, the spectacle of the thing over the thing itself. But there’s a limit to the magic of performance. On ‘Unfindable Ring’, he’s beginning to see the charade weigh on its recipients: even if the ruse works, it’ll cost him.‘Unfindable Ring', out October 23 on Bayonet Records, is an adventurer’s epic. The arc of the journey, like any good Spirited Away or Neverending Story, lands its wide-traveled protagonist right back at home before bedtime. Grumpy, like many great hero tricksters before him, has always been a project of juxtaposition: upbeat radio-ready hits whose buoyant, goofy hooks belie the dark thoughts they describe. Much of this, Schmitt acknowledges, owes its due to the matter-of-fact morbidity of the trans experience in America. It’s from these experiences—personal, romantic, political, and existential—that the tale of ‘Unfindable Ring’ unfolds.Ambition and play have always defined the Grumpy sound. Late last year, the Fader praised their “demented, hooky” EP, “Piebald,” whose innovative fuzz-pop confections earned them coverage in NPR and the New York Times. Stereogum heralded them as “wonderfully weird,” and Paste designated them “the best of what’s next.”” Through boisterous collaborations with the likes of Sidney Gish and Claire Rousay, they’ve effortlessly ingratiated themselves with the titans of DIY, and, more recently, Schmitt has become an unlikely favored collaborator of chart-topping country giant Zach Bryan, who named his new record––which prominently features Schmitt’s harmonies––conspicuously, ‘With Heaven On Top.’In Grumpy, Heaven Schmitt is joined by Anya Good, Ellie Long (Kid Lake), Austin Arnold, Diego Clare (D.A. Crimson), and Lane Rodgers, who each contribute to every step of the process—engineering and recording, mixing, drafting artwork, producing, and making music videos. A kind of interdisciplinary thieves’ guild, the project, while once Schmitt’s solo eponym, is a labor of communal love.They recorded the album “in the tiny stinky room that is our practice space and studio,” run by drummer Arnold, and finished it at Living Room in Queens with Lucas Padulo (Gunna, Roddy Ricch, Lil Baby). Even when they sent it to their mixing and mastering engineer Steve Vealey (Phoenix, Bon Jovi, Laura Marling), they didn’t relinquish control, spending a week alongside him in his studio, perfecting the levels together.Energetic and versatile, whizzing between synths fit for an ’80s movie soundtrack, honkytonk strings, jazz percussion, shoegaze distortion, and enough vocoder to replace the Siri library, characters cast out on missions across the country, the world, even across time. Sometimes it sounds like DSU-era Alex G, other times Massive Attack; one minute it’s 100 gecs and the next it’s earnest, acoustic, fragile, a sound entirely Schmitt’s own.On standout “The Whale,” we hear a glitchy vocal sample. One of the surprising moments Good appears on across the record, having harvested an Ableton trove of hundreds of sounds she’s created. Listen closely, you realize it’s a little girl talking to a parrot, and the parrot squawking back. Elsewhere on the album are any number of other colorful experiments. “Unfindable Ring” utilizes mechanized horror-movie kitsch, distortion whizzing into mist, a kind of John Carpenter pastiche, whereas “OBL,” a full-throated Americana anthem complete with gang vocals and Schmitt’s warbling twang, features a session fiddle player. (The latter is not a new direction––Schmitt got his start in Nashville writing folk music.)Lead single “Twenty Five,” a shoegazey ’90s jam framed by a dark bass line and tight revolving drums, is about Schmitt’s girlfriend and bandmate, the aforementioned Long. Appropriately reminiscent of the pop-rock bangers dominating the airwaves of Grumpy’s youth, the song is about time travel. Long has admitted that she wishes she could go back in time and transition as a little kid, to live the girlhood she always wanted. “It’s about loving her so much and having this really selfish thought of like, Oh God, what if you do that and we never meet?” Schmitt confesses. “The song is me telling her, If you ever get that opportunity, please leave a clue so that you can get back to me in the present.” He sings with her, their voices distorted together: “You and me, dressing up / growing our hair long / singing love songs.”“George Clanton,” an ode to the thirty-eight-year-old vaporwave great popular among a particular subset of Arizona Ice Tea-drinking former college kids. Good, who plays live drums for him, took Schmitt out to see a show. Schmitt was astounded by Clanton’s weirdness, his unapologetic costumey swagger. That’s exactly how he wanted to be seen. “I wanna rock like George Clanton,” goes the bridge, “I’ll swing my cock like George Clanton.” (Schmitt did D.M. Clanton the song, to which the older musician replied: “That’s fire bro. I wish I wrote it. I love the cock part.”) “Nothing’s gonna get in my way,” Schmitt repeats on the outro.On hushed finale “Queens,” Grumpy finally traverses the final frontier––the train back to Ridgewood. The track shears away the dense layers of intricate production to leave only Schmitt’s unmodulated falsetto over keys and guitar. At its core, it’s a ballad about friendship. “Everybody thinks we’re in love,” Schmitt sings, in a delicate head voice, “but we’re only practicing kissing.” He wrote it for Good, who plays the complementary piano melody.With lead single “OBL,” jubilant as its rollicking heartland groove feels, it chronicles the grimmer aspects of the band’s touring reality. The Grumpy band is almost completely trans (five-sixths, save for Arnold). When rights are daily disappearing, when the type of Tolkienesque intrepid expeditioning ‘Unfindable Ring’ aspires to is stymied by the threat of violence, an awareness of danger is counterbalanced by a gratitude for the small miracle of even making it this far.“We are living these happy lives, and there are people we come across who don’t know us at all who want us to die,” Schmitt, explains. Often the visibility of the joy itself is what prompts the vitriol––“I’m so happy I could die,” Schmitt belts over and over on the chorus (a familiar figure of speech, sure, but one which, upon any scrutiny, shows Schmitt’s hand in the macabre.) A middle finger to fate, Good started asking, “What are you going to do with your One Beautiful Life?” Grumpy is going to keep playing, touring, searching, finding.
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