LOS ANGELES, CA– There are certain artists whose music seems to find you again at precisely the right moment. For me, Glom has become one of them.
I first encountered Sean Dunnevant, the Brooklyn-based musician behind Glom, at SXSW in 2025. There was something immediately familiar about his music, a strain of melodic, slightly melancholy alternative rock that scratched a very particular ’90s college-radio itch for me. Last year, when I wrote about his single “Glass,” I found myself drawn to the anxiety running beneath its easygoing exterior. It was a song about trying to enjoy the moment while knowing that, somewhere beyond your immediate field of vision, everything could be falling apart.
A year later, I’m still listening. And with “Dollars,” Glom may have found an even more compelling way to articulate that feeling.
“Dollars” arrives as the second single from Glom’s forthcoming five-song EP, Bread, due December 4 via Nettwerk. Recorded at Thump Studios in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, the EP reunites Dunnevant with producer and mixer Sahil Ansari, who also worked on Glom’s most recent full-length, Below. Dunnevant has described Bread as a deliberate sonic departure from that record, trading some of Below’s dream-pop haze and reverb for drier vocals and a more immediate ’90s alternative-rock drum sound.
You can hear that clarity on “Dollars.” Compared with some of Glom’s earlier recordings, everything here feels remarkably clean and purposeful. The drums have punch without overwhelming the melody, the guitars retain their texture without disappearing into a wall of sound, and Dunnevant’s vocal sits close enough that the observations he’s making feel almost conversational. There’s also a lovely little guitar passage around the 2:20 mark that I keep waiting for every time I play the song. It isn’t some grand, indulgent solo. It arrives, makes its point, and slips naturally back into the song.
But what has kept me returning to “Dollars” is what Dunnevant is actually thinking about underneath all of that melodic ease.
According to Dunnevant, the song grew out of feeling overwhelmed by the news and everything happening in the world, followed by the realization that the news, in some fundamental sense, has felt like this for most of our lives. Every crisis seems unprecedented while we are living through it. Zoom out far enough, though, and humanity begins to look remarkably repetitive. Different names, different places, different generations, but many of the same anxieties, conflicts and impulses cycling through again and again.
That idea feels especially potent right now.
I’ve personally been thinking a lot lately about money. Not simply about having it, spending it or earning more of it, but about what money represents and what we collectively decide is worthy of value. The older I get, the stranger some of those decisions can seem.
So when “Dollars” turns its attention toward human beings dressing themselves for conflict, feeding their egos and pouring extraordinary amounts of money into endeavors that ultimately amount to destruction, the song lands differently for me. There is something profoundly absurd about the resources humanity can summon when it wants to fight, dominate or prove a point, particularly when those same resources could theoretically be directed toward making life better.
What is all that money actually worth if we are perpetually finding new ways to burn through it?
That is not necessarily the question Dunnevant is explicitly asking, and I don’t need him to answer it. One of the things I appreciate most about “Dollars” is that it leaves enough room for the listener to bring something of themselves into it. His exhaustion with the news becomes a doorway into a much larger meditation on value, power, ego and the peculiar priorities we have accepted as normal.
And somehow, none of this sounds miserable.
That might be the song’s greatest trick.
There is an almost carefree quality to “Dollars,” right down to those recurring “ba ba bye” refrains. Dunnevant can contemplate geopolitical conflict one moment and joke about watching Sully while sitting aboard an airplane the next. The juxtaposition is funny because it is recognizably human. We consume catastrophe, entertainment, anxiety and mundane everyday life through essentially the same stream of consciousness. Then we board another flight, check another headline and keep going.
Even the song’s repeated reassurance that these feelings have existed “all your life” carries a strange kind of comfort. Initially, that thought should probably make things worse. If humanity has always behaved this way, what hope is there that anything changes?
Yet “Dollars” somehow flips the proposition around. Maybe recognizing the cycle is precisely what allows you to loosen its grip on you.
Near the end, Dunnevant describes feeling almost weightless while simultaneously reminding himself to remain grounded. That contradiction feels like the emotional destination of the song. He hasn’t fixed the world. He hasn’t discovered the secret to eliminating greed, war, ego or anxiety. He has simply changed his relationship to the weight of all of it.
That resonates with me.
There are days when opening the news can make the world seem uniquely broken, as though we have somehow stumbled into a period of dysfunction unlike anything that preceded it. Then you remember that previous generations had their own wars, financial crises, political upheavals and existential fears. Their headlines felt unprecedented to them, too.
Maybe perspective doesn’t make any of those problems less real. Maybe it simply reminds us that we are still here.
That is where I hear an interesting evolution from the Glom I wrote about last year. “Glass” captured the anxiety of trying to preserve a small moment of peace while sensing everything outside of it closing in. “Dollars” feels like the camera has pulled considerably farther back. The anxiety remains, but now Dunnevant seems able to look at the machinery producing some of it and recognize just how strange the whole thing is.
And I find myself strangely comforted by that.
“Dollars” is thoughtful without becoming preachy, cynical without surrendering to cynicism, and musically polished without sanding away the character that initially attracted me to Glom. It takes some genuinely heavy ideas and somehow turns them into something I want to play again immediately after it ends.
When I wrote about “Glass,” I knew Glom was an artist I wanted to keep an eye on.
I’m glad I did.
Bread arrives December 4 via Nettwerk. The five-track EP includes “Dollars,” “I Don’t Need a Thing at All,” “Keep It a Memory,” “One Track Mind” and “Water for Nothing.”
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