Harrison Gordon - BLISS
- Samuel Stevens
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
There’s something beautifully contradictory about calling an album BLISS when so much of it sounds like the emotional equivalent of staring directly into the void and screaming back at it. But that tension is precisely where Harrison Gordon’s sophomore album finds its power. Freshly signed to Hopeless Records, the Illinois-raised punk rock outfit could have taken the opportunity to smooth out the rough edges that helped turn them from a DIY project into one of the underground’s fastest-rising acts. Instead, BLISS, out September 4, 2026, via Hopeless Records, doubles down on the mess. And thank god for that.
What began as a solo project for Harrison Gordon evolved through basement shows, word-of-mouth enthusiasm, and viral TikTok exposure into something considerably larger. Following 2023’s self-released The Yuppies Are Winning and 2025’s Spring Break EP, the band now finds itself playing alongside acts such as State Champs, Hot Mulligan and Arms Length. Yet BLISS never sounds like a band trying to prove it belongs on those bigger stages. It sounds like a band determined to drag the basement with them.
Across eleven tracks, Gordon and company occupy the messy intersection between heartland punk, emo, and indie rock, delivering songs that are equally comfortable being shouted by a room full of strangers or screamed privately into a pillow. The guitars retain a wonderfully abrasive edge, the hooks arrive with enough immediacy to lodge themselves in your head, and the performances consistently carry the sense that everything could come apart at any moment. That imperfection isn't a flaw. It is the point.
There are obvious touchstones here in the abrasive second-album tradition of records like Weezer’s Pinkerton and Nirvana’s In Utero. BLISS possesses that same refusal to make emotional discomfort aesthetically convenient. The ugliness is allowed to remain ugly. The frustration remains frustrating. The vulnerability isn't polished into something inspirational. The result is an album that feels remarkably honest about what it means to be young, overwhelmed and increasingly exhausted by the world around you.
“Like Me Less” is perhaps the clearest example. Gordon turns inward, examining self-loathing and the tendency to project personal struggles onto the people closest to us. The song's emotional center is devastating precisely because there is no easy resolution: “No one knows me, I barely know me” isn't presented as a temporary crisis but as an uncomfortable admission of how disconnected a person can become from themselves.
Then comes the immense track, “Not Working! Not Working!”, a furious and wonderfully irreverent rejection of hustle culture. What began as a song about Gordon's experience working in food service has grown into something much broader—an indictment of the expectation that every waking moment should somehow be productive. The song understands the absurdity of turning hobbies, friendships, and even rest into opportunities for optimization. It’s punk rock with a modern target: the nagging voice insisting that you should always be doing more.
“Pretty” attacks another defining anxiety of contemporary life. Its subject—the embarrassment and discomfort of interacting with people in the real world—sounds almost comically mundane until Gordon reveals how easily the safety of a screen can become a substitute for actually living. The song captures the dopamine-loop mentality of algorithm-driven content without ever sounding like a lecture. Instead, it feels painfully recognizable.
That’s one of BLISS’s greatest strengths. Gordon doesn't approach anxiety, depression, alienation, or capitalism as abstract concepts. They exist in the mundane details of everyday life: jobs, relationships, phone and computer screens, expectations, insecurity, and the exhausting realization that adulthood isn't necessarily going according to plan.
Tracks like “Weirdo,” “Milwaukee Josh,” and “Like Me Less” establish the album's emotional vocabulary early, while “Scab,” “Sight of Blood,” “Middle Name,” “Oh God, (featuring Excuse Me Who Are You?)” and “Buffalo Jim” keep expanding its world. There’s an intentionally conversational quality throughout the record, as though these songs were pulled directly from late-night conversations, intrusive thoughts and half-formed frustrations before being amplified through guitars and drums.
And then there is “Bliss,” the album's title track and final statement. After spending much of the record confronting the anxieties of modern existence, ending on BLISS feels less like declaring victory than accepting that happiness doesn't have to mean everything is fixed. Sometimes bliss is simply finding a few minutes where the noise stops. That idea makes the album title feel increasingly clever as the record unfolds.
Harrison Gordon's greatest achievement on BLISS is that they haven't confused growth with refinement. The band's profile may be growing, the stages may be getting bigger, and the record may now carry the Hopeless Records logo, but the music still feels immediate, human and slightly out of control. The hooks are bigger, the songwriting is sharper, and the emotional stakes are higher, but the band's fingerprints remain all over everything. There is catharsis here, but it isn't clean catharsis. BLISS doesn't tell you everything will be okay. It simply gives you eleven songs to scream when it isn't.
For a band that built its reputation on connection, that's perhaps the most important evolution of all. BLISS doesn't abandon the DIY spirit that made Harrison Gordon compelling in the first place. It amplifies it. This is the sound of a band getting bigger without sanding itself down—messy, funny, anxious, angry, vulnerable and completely unwilling to pretend that modern life makes any damn sense.
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