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LABEL: Dead Oceans
RELEASE DATE: 05/29/2026
VARIANT: Crystal Clear Vinyl LP
Greg Mendez is an economical songwriter. Restraint and simplicity are the tools he works with, and each song gets sharpened down to a plain, cutting truth. Beauty Land is his debut LP for Dead Oceans, and the narrator steering you through it is wry but forgiving, an underdog who has learned to hold cynicism and faith in the same hand. Nothing here asks for pity. These are small altars of imperfection, carried on pop melodies, bright but urgent guitars, and a voice reaching for choir-boy innocence.
Most of Beauty Land was recorded straight to tape, nearly alone, in Mendez's makeshift home studio in Philadelphia — a small room with no natural light. It's his first full length since the self-titled breakout of 2023, a slow-burn success that came after 15 years of writing and recording in relative obscurity between Philly and New York. Three years on, the record picks up the same threads — grief, love, addiction — and the intense, quiet clarity of it shows Mendez at his songwriting best. Parts play like a lucid dream, dented characters carving through a world that's cartoonish and warped: the broken-clock march of "I Wanna Feel Pretty," the chiming toy piano on "Gentle Love." "Mary / Dreaming" starts as a sparse, finger-picked lament before cutting abruptly to a deflated, Beach-Boys-but-make-it-f***ed-up resolution that brings melancholy and joy at once, a sense that all things can be true at the same time. None of the 14 tracks here break three minutes, but they tell stories that span lifetimes.
Death floats through the record, whether as a memory or a threat. Everything feels precarious. There's a fragility to how these songs are built: the funeral organ hitting alongside the morphine on "Looking Out Your Window," the devastating simplicity of "Frog" with its slowed-down keyboard and bare refrain, "Please forgive me for my faults." At times Beauty Land feels impossibly lonely. Which makes it count when it doesn't — Mendez singing in harmony with his wife and bandmate Veronica near the end of "So Mean" lands like a cherished reunion, a fleeting moment of redemption, a temporary parting of the seas.
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