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Genre:

Rock

Label:

Post Present Medium

Release Date:

2026

Guiding Light singer Elise Cook is not German by blood or birth; they grew up in the UK before their family relocated to San Francisco and, later, Austin. Yet their cadence and intonation when singing in German are so even-keeled that it makes the band’s Texan roots seem like a punchline: Where’s the last place a band that sounds like this would hail from?

Guiding Light introduced themselves as an anomaly of foreign swagger and freeform ideas with their 2024 self-titled EP, where Cook hollered over John Morales’ prickly guitar as if the quartet had been doing this for years. In reality, Cook never dreamed of joining a band. But when bassist Rachel Kirk met them while catching Billy Idol at the new wave festival Cruel World, Kirk knew their shared love for the source material would make Cook the perfect lead vocalist for Guiding Light, her new band making rattling, almost European post-punk.

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On their 18-minute full-length debut, Fear on My Own Time, Guiding Light smelt their influences into cold steel: Television’s plucky confidence on guitar, Sonic Youth’s disaffected aggression, the unconventional pop hooks of 1980s new wave outcasts. Although they say they tried to write more songs in English this go-around, Cook can’t help but revert to German once the mic is in hand. They liken it to a scene in the documentary B-Movie: Lust and Sound in West Berlin, when Ideal vocalist Annette Humpe confesses that singing to German crowds in English serves as a shield against judgement or disappointment. “I can hide when I sing in German because no one knows what the fuck I’m saying,” Cook told See/Saw last year. They sing with a vagabond spirit, emphasizing universal emotions—longing for human connection, the dejection of self-critique, irate frustration with modern-day fascism—and guaranteeing you don’t need to speak German to understand what’s being felt.

Morales’ ever-shifting guitar work supplies the movement to back up Cook’s hypnotism. Though he plays with reckless abandon—breakneck strumming, bold finger-picked parts, the occasional missed note in back-to-back chords—each guitar line is remarkably clean. It’s the work of a seasoned guitarist dismembering his instincts. If Morales and drummer Daniel Powell treat Guiding Light like an outlet for loud, uncontainable ideas, that’s because it is; they founded the band as an alternative to their indie-pop act, Touch Girl Apple Blossom. Morales pivots through “Egoismus” as if overcome with new ideas of where and how to steer a song, assembling riffs like a tangle of sharp wires and daring you to extend a finger to touch. Learning the rules just to break them is about accepting a loss of control, and each time Morales plays slightly off-beat in the title track, it jolts the song to life.

All four members of Guiding Light are aligned in this haphazard approach, where craggy embellishments are liable to send a track in a new direction. The jangle-pop touches in “Haare” and “Die Zunge” enliven the songs despite the heaviness of the punk drumming. Guiding Light’s magnetism swells during the album’s bookends: a punched-up guitar riff and Cook’s alluring drawl make opener “Shackled by Lust” sound like a long-lost underground classic, and closer “Liebe Im Kapitalistischen Reich” is a sprawling jam fueled by Cook’s righteous fury and Kirk and Powell’s barreling rhythms. As Cook sputters out thoughts in German, the rest of Guiding Light embody a similarly European-ish spirit: casually cool in an unpolished manner, holding their musical alcohol no matter how rambunctious things get.

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