Giant Day is the latest musical project by multi-instrumentalist Derek Almstead and singer Emily Growden, bringing together their pop and psychedelic influences from years in the vibrant Athens, Georgia music scene. Almstead (Circulatory System, The Olivia Tremor Control, The Glands, Elf Power, of Montreal), is known for his work with the storied The Elephant 6 Collective, and has established himself as a respected song-writer, producer and recording engineer. Growden (Marshmallow Coast, Faster Circuits, The New Sound of Numbers), with her background in vocal studies at the University of Georgia, has lent her voice to various recordings and live performances in the indie music scene. Giant Day’s debut album, Glass Narcissus,out in 2024 bore a unique weight — it wasn’t just a debut album, it was the debut album by the first official Elephant 6 band in more than 15 years. With the 2023 wide-release of the documentary The Elephant 6 Recording Co. codifying the E6 “sound” for some and introducing it to others, what Giant Day conjured into being on Glass Narcissus was, if not against type, notably darker than the lysergic, sun-drenched pop associated with their former Athens, Georgia home. On October 10, 2025, The Elephant 6 Recording Company will release Alarm, their second full-length album.

What They Say:
Emily Growden: “Lyrically, Golden Times explores the mind of a cult leader; a successful narcissist and charlatan who is fulfilling the fantasy of absolute power. The “only I can save you” way of thinking which is causing so much damage to our country.”
Derek Almstead: “After Bill Doss died in 2012, The Olivia Tremor Control ended, and I toured a lot as a sound engineer and had a lot of time by myself. During that time I fell in love with the Cocteau Twins albums Blue Bell Knoll, Heaven Or Las Vegas and Four Calendar Cafe and listened to them maybe 100 times in headphones… on the bus, on the plane, etc. It took me awhile to realize why I find their music so moving, and when I did it helped clarify something I’d been searching for in my own writing. The chord changes and beats- the music itself is beautiful, but uncomplicated and fairly straightforward. Obviously Elizabeth Fraser’s voice and melodies are absolute magic, but her lyrics are indecipherable, so your imagination really carries a lot of weight. I feel like that’s similarly a huge part of what makes My Bloody Valentine’s  Loveless so sticky- leaving all of that space for the listener’s brain to react to and create. That creative listening component is what’s been keeping me excited about music my whole life, but the studio makes it a little too easy to come up with ideas to fill up that space. I’ve really limited the elements with which I’ve allowed myself to write, and try to keep it simple. So yeah, this is a shoegaze song, but th model is something that we’re applying to everything we’re doing. I fell into this very simple visual pattern on the guitar last fall while writing this, and realized it was almost definitely the way Will Hart wrote The Olivia Tremor Control’s Green Typewriters 10– the one with the refrain “If you’re ready to come back down, I’ll be waiting here/ All your friends will be around/ I promise I’ll wait here forever”. It’s a simple II-VI-III progression, but he never uses “cowboy chords”- instead he uses easy patterns with a bunch of open strings. I was excited to show him that I had discovered it and how I’d recycled it, but I didn’t get the chance. He was such a big cheerleader for the last record. I was going to surprise him with this mountain of tunes, but I wanted to get them to a place where they were closer to completion. I spent all of October 2024 building up a demo structure for every song fragment I had laying around, and I ended up with 33 pieces. I created basic arrangements to use the skeletons on which the songs were built, and bounced them off Emily for feedback. Then I spent all of November adding live drums while getting my chops up for my December tour playing drums with The Ladybug Transistor. Will passed away the day before I left for tour. It was a real blow to our whole community let alone this project, but I know he would have been psyched about it.“

Their Mixtape:

Lilys – A Diana’s Diana (2006)

The Late BP Helium turned me onto Lilys right around the time he, Kevin and I started of Montreal in 1996. ‘Better Can’t Make Your Life Better’ was wearing the Kinks flavor boldly (more even than we were at the time), but it had an elusive, abstract quality that seems central to everything Kurt Heasley creates. A few years later (now with the second lineup of of Montreal), we had the great luck to open some shows for him on the East Coast of the US in support of his album ‘The 3 Way’. At this point his band was pretty much all the members of The Beachwood Sparks (with genius producer Michael Deming playing bass). Those shows were super inspiring and Kurt was larger than life. I would run into him over the following decades as his bands and sound changed and evolved, and I was always excited about the continuous thread of his beautiful melodies and unpredictable ideas. Somehow this song only came into focus for me in the past few years and I’m continually obsessed by it. It’s so difficult to pin down and yet so simple and catchy at a glance. It’s become my favorite tune from one of my favorite bands.
-Derek Almstead

Mathématiques Modernes – Jungle Hurt (1981)

In 2022 we vacationed with my family in Greece and spent some time in Athens, Santorini and Crete. We were in Rethymno a few days walking the ancient tiny streets, riding e-bikes way too fast up the hills, eating incredible food… all the things you’re supposed to do. A coffee shop Emily and I went to everyday employed the perfectly proper snobby baristas (something she and I deeply relate to since we met as baristas working in a snobby coffee shop). This song was playing on the stereo and I used one of the iPhone song identifying apps to find out what it was. I asked the barista if it was something he was playing or just the radio because I really loved it and he gave me the most disdainful, cooler-than-thou response “Of course I am playing this; everyone knows this”. Ha, well somehow it slipped by me! I like to imagine, without solid evidence, that this was hugely influential to Stereolab, who were hugely influential to us. It feels like a missing DNA link besides all of the obvious Krautrock influences.
-DA

Arnold Dreyblatt – Point Rotation (1995)

My friend Josh McKay from Macha and Deerhunter turned me onto ‘Animal Magnetism’ back in 1998-99 and it blew me away. I’ve always loved the trance element that repetition in music can create, and Dreyblatt’s approach to it is so unique. His mastery of tension and release, of textural and rhythmic contrast is inspiring. The tension! He pulls you way up on a lift and holds you there and then just keeps cranking it up until you get to this euphoric state. Heather McIntosh and I played South By Southwest with Elf Power in 2007, and Arnold was part of the Table Of Elements showcase performing in a huge beautiful church. We got to meet him afterwards and felt like we were meeting the Beatles.
-DA

Julien Gasc – Les flots (2020)

We met Julien in his hometown of Toulouse in 2010. I’d missed his group Aquaserge when they played in Athens a year before, but he’d made a connection with our scene and hosted a show for Elf Power and Madeline on our European tour. We stayed at their beautiful chateau, complete with a ham leg curing over the fireplace; drinking too much and listening to awesome French pop records late into the night. Sometime after that he started releasing records under his own name, and each one has been beautiful, mature and inspiring. This one, ‘L’appel De La Forêt’, I spent an outsized amount of time with during the pandemic, and it’s one of my favorites of his. I love really his music.
-DA

Need New Body – Show Me Your Heart (2003)

In 2002 on my first tour with Circulatory System we played a bunch of shows with these guys on the West Coast of the US and became friends. I’d played a show with an earlier incarnation of this group in Philly a few years previous when I was in Summer Hymns, and they were amazing then, but hadn’t cracked open the full monstrous potential of what they would become. In fact, one of the two keyboardists, Dale and I had corresponded a little about them coming down to Athens to record with me. Lucky for them they ended up connecting with another good friend/incredible musician and producer Griffin Rodriguez (from Bablicon, Icy Demons, Beirut), and did three incredible records with him before they dissolved in the mid-00’s. This band has such a great combination of musical intelligence, wild fun and secret beauty. They were my absolute favorite live band of the early 00’s and I’m honored to have been able to do shows with them. Jamey Robinson, the other Need New Body keyboardist, continues to make incredible music with his band Buffalo Stance and we’ve been doing a bunch shows together now that we live in Pennsylvania.
-DA

The Moles – The Crasher (1994)

I wish we could put all of ‘Instinct’ on the playlist- every aspect of this album is so cool to me. Loose, heavy, sardonic, lush, organic, beautiful. Giant Day did a cover of “Cassie Peek” for a compilation put out by 6612 Tapes, which is run by Hilarie and Per Ole Bratset of The High Water Marks. We sent our version to Richard Davies of The Moles to see if he liked it well enough for us to release it; he just wrote back, “Sounds good” and I lost my mind. That was a real high point. This song destroys with its mess. I can be real scum.
-Emily Growden
Will Hart turned me on to this album right around the time Emily and I started spending time together, and it’s deeply entwined with my memories of the early days of our relationship. We’ve spent a good many times singing along to it in the car on road trips. “Did you see Steve McQueen?”
-DA

Virna Lindt – Underwater Boy (1984)

I love the slow stacking of this song. Love the feeling of spaciousness simultaneous with the feeling of a thousand things paddling by. Love the Busby Berkeley chorus of swimmers with sparklers in their hair I envision during the tambourine bridge. It’s a pop masterpiece.
-EG
This mix is incredible, so much space and depth. A top play on my production playlist.
-DA

Suburban Lawns – Flavor Crystals (1983)

Su Tissue’s voice is a big influence on me, though I sound nothing like her.  I listened to this song on repeat while I was recording vocals for ‘Alarm’. I’d literally step outside and listen to it in earbuds, step back into the studio and hit record. I hoped to channel some of her loose warmth and richness; whether I achieved anything close to that or not is up for debate. I feel as though my own voice can be very precise and cold, so in my theory me doing a full-blown Su Tissue impression would result in something somewhere in the middle. Like a red on green color correction. And of course this song is FUN.
-EG

Michael Karoli & Polly Eltes – Sentimental (1984)

I only discovered this record for myself when I went to find out who sang the bridge about the cloud containing the sea containing the whale containing the man missing his raincoat on Eno’s “Mother Whale Eyeless”. Polly Eltes is a musician/artist/photographer/model who got her start in the 70s-a real heyday of musician/artist/photographer/models. I love her joyful, casual delivery on this song especially. It’s lighthearted and breezy-how I’d like to be. As someone who is more than a little bit stage-shy, I try to keep these lyrics in the front of my head before a show… “I can walk in any room, look you in the eye/ Who me? I’m not shy!”. And of course Michael Karoli played guitar and many other instruments in Can, a big influence. This is an amazing collaboration.
-EG

Franco Battiato – Una cellula (1971)

This stunning song about death and rebirth as a cell affects me on a cellular level. It’s kind and it’s fearless. I’ve heard no more beautiful sound in my life than these soaring synths. Listen to it loud and in headphones-it’ll make you want to believe in an afterlife.
-EG
I don’t have the bug in me to be constantly searching for new music, and so most of the new stuff I pick up comes via friends whose tastes I trust. John Fernandes turned me on to this record during a Circulatory System tour in 2007. This stuff sits right next to a bunch of other perfect psyche-pop records that had a huge effect, similarly discovered through those long drives.
-DA

This Heat – Repeat (1993)

Will Hart played this for me in his upstairs music room in 2002, along with Fennesz’s ‘Endless Summer’ (from which I’d also include a track if I didn’t feel as though our playlist was getting a little overlong). We listened over and over again; getting a little out of our heads smoking pot and blasting it, screaming over the music about every exciting and dramatic change in the mix, grooving and dancing. We spent years doing that. That childlike, hyped-up energy about music was something that bonded us early on. I think of this song when I think of him, and the pure fun and joy of being production sound fiends. As I understand it, this is a 24-track tape loop and a classic dub-style, hands-on-the-faders and the effects knobs performance. This one is a journey if you dive in, don’t be intimidated by the run time.
-DA

The Album:

“The word “former” is important to Giant Day’s origin story. In 2020, Almstead and Growden moved from Athens to rural Pennsylvania, where they became caretakers of a family farm. They converted the horse stables into a studio and continued to write and record music, but they were dislocated from their sense of the world, let alone anything resembling a “scene.” That lack of place — what Almstead and Growden refer to as the “dissonance” between the beauty of their new home and the reality of the world beyond it — crept into their songs, a desperate signal emanating from off the grid.
On Alarm, that signal is stronger, more urgent. With the momentum of Glass Narcissus at their back, Giant Day returned home from tour and poured themselves into making new music. The alluring, paranoid throb underpinning their songs is keener now, more lived in, as if the veil between the fears of characters whose points of view Almstead had written from on Glass Narcissus and his own had dropped. “It’s the first time I’ve ever put out a record that’s concurrent with what’s going on in the world,” he says, “where everything, music and lyrics, has that weight bearing on it.”
Growden’s voice, a glassy siren’s call shimmering on the horizon of Giant Day’s songs, also finds new resonance on Alarm. Her singing remains cool and precise, but as with Almstead, there is less distance between her and the material now, reflecting her expanding role in composing these songs. When Almstead toured with The Ladybug Transistor in late 2024, she stayed home in Patience, writing lyrics and melodies in the dead calm of winter — more than imagining isolation, she offers up her own. “I’m proud of it, but it was hell,” she says with a laugh. “Being alone for it took me to a pretty dark place, but it forced me to be confident about the decisions I was making, the direction I wanted to go.”
The result is unsettling — at turns furious and blissful; danceable, but in the way where what compels you to dance isn’t joy, but the need to purge oneself of emotion at the end of the day for the sake of making it through tomorrow. It’s a looser sound, not for lack of craft, but because the frayed nerve they’ve exposed is their own. Growden breathes the opening line of “Devil Dog,” “Is it painless,” with a determined chill, but the deliberate spacing of the phrase, breaking between “it” and “painless” is a line cracking through a sheet of ice that’s about to break. Instead, her focus snaps around Almstead’s bassline, and it’s as if the two of them are white-knuckling it together through a haunted house on the B-52’s “Planet Claire.”
Horror is a prevailing theme of Alarm: the shock of it in newness, the way one grows numb to it, the brief respite we find from it, and the cycle that results. What Giant Day capture at their poppiest — as on “King of Ghosts,” a propulsive psych-funk raver in which Growden shrugs “I’ve guess you’ve got your reasons” to a rising swell of apocalyptic images — is very of this moment, the strange way in which the world feels like it should stop to redress any number of issues but instead hurtles ceaselessly towards oblivion, “Steady at the wheel / no distractions.”
In “Golden Times,” Almstead and Growden find shelter in each other, a glittering soundscape of stacked harmonies, synths that tower into eternity, and reverb that slows time to a crawl. Like their home in Patience, it’s a bubble, one Almstead and Growden know they can’t occupy forever, and that could burst at any time. What’s so brave about Alarm is that Giant Day break down this fortress themselves, allowing birdsong to burst through the walls of synthesizer when they’ve turned sour and dystopic, letting a beam of sunlight in when things are at their darkest. “One minute closer to midnight,” Almstead sings on “Good Neighbor,” referring to the ticking of the doomsday clock. 
The world is terrifying — existence of the doomsday clock is proof enough of this — but in its last moment Alarm offers up something more than paranoia as a response: “Call if you need anything.” What ends up breaking on Alarm is not ice, but spiritual winter — there is something green, something verdant, something hopeful in that final note, however unwritten the future beyond it is. One aches to hear something so tender. Almstead and Growden ache in finding it. But that ache is like a muscle knitting more tightly together, growing stronger, more resilient — something will survive into the future, no matter how hostile that future is.“

Alarm will be out on October 10th via The Elephant 6 Recording Co.. Look HERE for more information on Giant Day.