Red House Painters

Since 1988 · United States

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Red House Painters I (1993)

The self-titled 1993 debut, universally known as Rollercoaster for its cover, stretches out at a pace few rock records of its era attempted, several songs running well past six minutes on the strength of patience alone rather than any buildup toward a climax. "Katy Song" moves at a near-stationary tempo, Kozelek's voice sitting just above a murmur over slowly shifting guitar chords, the melody taking its time to reveal itself. "Have You Forgotten" shows the same unhurried approach applied to something closer to a lament. It's a record that helped define what would later be called slowcore — extended, spacious, and almost entirely unconcerned with momentum.

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Red House Painters

Red House Painters I · 1993

Mark Kozelek formed Red House Painters in San Francisco in the early 1990s, and the band's slow, spacious arrangements and Kozelek's plainspoken, often devastating lyrics helped define what critics would later call "slowcore" — extended, unhurried songs that resisted the more aggressive dynamics of contemporaneous alternative rock. Signed to the influential British label 4AD, the band released several albums through the 1990s built around Kozelek's fingerpicked acoustic and electric guitar and a voice that rarely rose above a murmur.

Following Red House Painters' breakup in the early 2000s, Kozelek began recording under the name Sun Kil Moon, continuing the same unhurried, guitar-based songwriting — including a full album of reworked Modest Mouse covers, Tiny Cities (2005) — before the project's own high point, Benji (2014), brought him his widest audience yet with a set of unusually direct, plainly narrated songs about mortality and family. Across both names, Kozelek's music has remained defined by long, prose-like verses and an almost total resistance to conventional song structure.