Liteweight Champion survives the fire

Sean Gleeson felt as though the world was on fire when he wrote the songs that would become new Lightweight Champion album Geronimo Hardstyle, and the music often reflects this reality, the guitars on “Death Cup” racing across the landscape with the destructive force of a towering, windswept brushfire.

The musician credited aspects of this early inspiration to a September 2025 exhibition installed at Blockfort by his partner, the artist Karly Ratzenberger, that incorporated lots of deep reds along with images of burning crosses and cities engulfed in flame – ideas that continued to expand as Gleeson reflected on his surroundings.

“I mean, we live in a political hellscape,” said Gleeson, who joined bandmate Colin Giacalone for an interview ahead of Liteweight Champion’s record release show at Dick’s Den on Friday, Oct. 9, with support from Van Dale. “I’m not super happy with the political climate in the nation – or in the world, really. I think it’s weird we can’t talk about the genocide in Palestine, and that AI is this destructive thing we’re just supposed to be okay with. … I don’t know. I was thinking a lot about the state of the world and mental health and life and death.”

At times, these inspirations could be more esoteric – Gleeson described one song as “a murder mystery” and said another is about alien abduction – but the bulk of the record is unified by a sense of chaos that frequently radiates through the music itself.

“The first half is really, really heavy, and that was definitely intentional,” Gleeson said. “With the last album, we were just obsessed with trying to be as loud as possible. And with this, I feel like we tried to dive in deeper, where we could still be a loud band but figure out how to better convey some of these feelings.”

One of the more prevalent ideas surfaced in Geronimo Hardstyle is the finite nature of existence, with a number of the songs making references to death. Gleeson initially attributed this to having experienced mortality with greater frequency as he’s gotten older, but then also recalled having been involved in “a really insane car crash” a couple of years back that he has only recently begun to unpack. (The album cover art, done by Ratzenberger, features a skeleton piloting a fiery automobile, though Gleeson said any connection to actual events was unintentional.)

“I think when you experience something like that, it takes a lot longer to really process,” the musician continued. “But that could definitely be playing a part in things.”

While Gleeson took inspiration from his immediate environment, there exists within the record a pull toward the cosmos – “Spark You,” for one, includes lines about looking up to the sky – that the musician attributed in part to a desire to escape these corroded surroundings. “I wanted to create a world that you could live in inside this album,” said Gleeson, who at the time of writing was playing a lot of high fantasy video games, leading him to envision the album as an in-game map, of sorts, where listeners could explore different parts of a larger universe as they made their way through the recording. “I think a lot of it was trying to create a fictional place where this music could exist.”

While aspects of the album can be undeniably bleak, the music does bend gradually toward the light, first with “Country Sound” – the sonic equivalent of a springtime drive with the windows down and nothing but open rural roads ahead – and then with “Scorched Earth Serenity,” a song on which Gleeson’s early dismay hardens into defiance. “Over my dead body,” he sings, and then adds, “You’ll never take this from me.”

“I think that song, thematically, is really the climax of the record,” the musician said. “It’s about resisting and persisting.”

Album-closer “Life” stands then as a welcome exhale, Gleeson stepping outside of himself for the first time to pen an imagined story of rebirth. “It’s a story about two people I made up who rediscover their love for life, and I’ve never written a song like that before. It’s always written about someone I know, or some thought, or myself,” he said. “But I’ve never before created a story, and I think the only reason I was able to do that was because I felt like I’d worked through everything and came out the other side. And, yeah, I’m just pumped to keep going and to keep making things. … It makes me excited to see what happens next and just to really fucking enjoy it, because that’s what we should be doing, with art, with life.”