Shudder to Think – Pony Express Record

This record should not exist.

It sounds like a dare. Like a prank pulled on Epic Records’ A&R department in 1994—“Let’s sign these D.C. freaks who sound like Queen on dissociatives and see what happens.” What happened was Pony Express Record, a twisted, glittered monolith of broken pop and math-punk dementia that sounds less like a collection of songs and more like a sonic skin condition. You don’t listen to it, you wear it. And it itches.

This was the moment Shudder to Think stopped being a great post-hardcore band and became something other. Something grotesque and seductive. Something completely outside the taxonomy of ’90s alternative. They were too proggy for grunge, too glam for punk, too queer for the fratboy mosh pit, too jagged for radio, and way too smart for MTV. What they built instead was an alien language, a collision of perverse beauty and musical math that still baffles.

“Hit Liquor” kicks it off with no mercy. It’s not a song so much as a spasm—rhythmic whiplash, slashed harmonics, guitars zig-zagging like they’re dodging sniper fire, and Craig Wedren shrieking from the next dimension. His voice doesn’t live in any traditional register. It’s androgynous, operatic, feral. A Broadway phantom set loose in a D.C. squat. When he hits those high notes, it’s like someone slitting the sky open with a shard of stained glass. You either recoil or fall in love. Or both.

And that’s the trick. The whole record plays chicken with your ears. It seduces and repels in the same breath. “X-French Tee Shirt” is maybe the closest they get to something hook-adjacent—people call it a single, which is funny in a nervous-laughter kind of way. Sure, it has a chorus, but everything around it sounds like a building collapsing in 7/8 time. It’s a love song written during a seizure. It rules.

Then there’s “No Rm. 9, Kentucky,” which feels like a gospel dirge translated through codeine and car crashes. It moves like molasses over broken glass, all while Wedren moans like a glam Mick Jagger possessed by Klaus Nomi. “Earthquakes Come Home” sounds like a rock opera trying to escape its own skin.

There’s a through-line in this chaos. You can feel it if you squint through the madness: these songs want to be beautiful. They’re just trapped in a broken body. There’s yearning under the dissonance, glamor under the scabs. Wedren and co. weren’t trying to make you comfortable—they were trying to show you something ecstatic and diseased and real. The album feels like it’s bleeding out in front of you, smiling with lipstick smeared across its teeth.

Let’s talk sonics. The guitars don’t riff—they stab, they twitch, they preen. Stuart Hill and Nathan Larson are operating in some parallel harmonic system, throwing out voicings that sound like power chords caught in a bear trap. It’s not noise for noise’s sake. There’s precision here. Arrangement as weaponry. Every rhythmic shift feels premeditated but still sick in the head. They’re writing avant-pop that’s too unstable to stand still. Hooks dissolve into puzzles. Melodies get ambushed.

And holy hell, the rhythm section. Adam Wade on drums is the unsung hero of this record. The man plays like he’s trying to hold down a haunted house. Time signatures change mid-breath, grooves collapse into spasms, and somehow he keeps it all from flying off the rails. He’s the tourniquet that keeps the body from bleeding out.

It’s funny—people throw around “ahead of its time” like it’s a compliment. But Pony Express Record wasn’t ahead of its time. It ignored time. It spat in chronology’s face. It didn’t care what the market wanted or what scene it was supposed to belong to. It was glam infected with rot. It was post-hardcore with jazz hands. It was unclassifiable, which is probably why it flopped commercially. You couldn’t market this. You could only feel it.

Shudder to Think didn’t make another record like this. They couldn’t. Pony Express Record feels like a one-time transmission from some fevered alternate universe, and once they sent it, the signal broke. Later records had their moments, but nothing hit like this—this is the album where everything went supernova.

It’s not for everyone. It wasn’t meant to be. But if you’re the kind of person who likes your music fucked up and fabulous, who wants danger and decadence in the same breath, who craves the sound of a beautiful collapse—then this is your gospel.

Pony Express Record didn’t change the world. But it changed the ones who found it. And that’s enough.