• News

• All

Mar 06, 2025 By Caleb Campbell Photography by Matthew James

Shadow Monster is the project of frontwoman and guitarist Gillian Visco alongside drummer and collaborator John Swanson. The band debuted in 2019 with their first full-length album, Punching Bag, and last year they returned with a new track, “Poison,” the lead single from their forthcoming sophomore LP, DOG. The record finds the band expanding on their style of indie rock, grunge pop, and sadcore, incorporating stylistic signifiers from bygone eras of both punk and pop. Today, the band are sharing another new single from the record, “Goodwill,” premiering with Under the Radar.

“Goodwill” feels equally like the work of a swooning guitar pop outfit and fuzz-laden garage band. Sharply-written guitar lines and vocal melodies steeped in longing collide with turbulent instrumental passages as the band straddles the line between earworm pop songcraft and jagged rock textures. Lyrically, the track is an aching depiction of grief as Visco attempts to navigate the aftermath of the loss of her father. The track culminates in a supremely cathartic finale where Visco’s vocals fade into swaying pop harmonies and Swanson and Visco descend into a garage rock breakdown that feels equal parts charmingly ramshackle and irresitably melodic, anchoring the final moments in tumbling drum fills and crunchy guitars.

Visco says of the track, “Goodwill is about my father, John Visco, who was a piano player and shoe salesman. He was a vibrant man who lit up every room he walked into. He was the life of the party, filled with an undeniable charisma. He had a cheshire cat smile, and a booming laugh that could travel for miles. When he passed away in the very final days of 2018, it seemed impossible that a personality that big could just disappear. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. And suddenly my new life experience felt catatonic, dissociative and foggy. As if I was just drifting around from place to place, going through the motions. Grief is enormous and never ending. I felt it could be easier if I just chose to believe he was still alive.

‘Goodwill’ was one of those pours-out-in-one-sitting-in-the-middle-of-the-night type songs. I don’t believe that you need to be in complete anguish to make art. Yet, when you’re feeling more like a walking open wound than human being, on occasion, artists are gifted with a silver lining of being so vulnerable that you transform into a vessel. One that allows you to tap into some ancient expression of agony that’s been felt by so many others before you. And you find a way to let it travel through you. Every artist yearns for that moment of flow, and the process of writing ‘Goodwill’ was definitely one of those moments for me.

When approaching creating the music video, I knew I wanted to make something a little less literal that could be open for interpretation. I was a dance major in college and I love being able to incorporate modern dance into the music videos we make. (See: Kill Me Sweetie, Driftwood and Out of my Mind) My friend Mel and I have been talking for years about dancing together and we collaborated on the choreography for this video. It was inspired by the notion that we are all made of stardust. We are all Life and we are all Death, always. I wanted the dance to depict the ether that ties us together, and how different realms of existence blend and overlap. How Death follows us around wearing different hats, sometimes menacing and scary, and sometimes angelic and comforting. Once you gather up enough loved ones on the other side, one might yearn towards Death, like it’s a version of home.”

Check out the song and video below. DOG is out everywhere on April 4th via Substitute Scene Records.