PREMIERE: Feelin’ dirty? Brightly writes about sex, death, privilege and ball sports on Rugby

After spending most of the long weekend listening to Brightly, I just want to say that if he were a religion, I would like to pledge allegiance to it. Brightly’s music is filled with heavenly goodness, he has consistently soared to new heights with each of his releases. This time he has reached a new ultimate height with Rugby: audio climax.


Brightly comes across as some sort of technological wizard, his back catalogue consisting of a masterful audio visual collection, and Rugby, his new single, exceeds all expectations.

I’ve probably made him sound like an entity with my description above, but I just want to make it clear that Brightly is an actual person. Charlie Gleason, a.k.a. Brightly, is a musician, programmer, and computer science dropout. That’s just a general description of what he does, but if you’ve taken an extensive look at what he has really done, he’s heaps more than that. I would just refer to him as the David Bowie of Web 2.0.

Threading together folk, electronica and surreptitious recordings of children screaming in airplanes, Gleason began to construct what would become the debut album Beginnings & Endings from the safety of his bedroom. Armed with his rampant enthusiasm for the internets he built Tweetflight, an interactive Twitter-powered music video for Preflight Nerves, which won a bunch of awards.

Taken from his forthcoming third LP, One For Sorrow, Two For Joy, Rugby is a song about sex, and death, and privilege. It was written and recorded over a long winter in Reykjavík, Iceland, and London, England. Receiving the golden touch in the studio by longtime collaborator and Grammy-nominated engineer Andrei Eremin, this is a song that will linger in your brains for weeks to come.


It made me feel like a jellyfish, just casually cruising in the ocean. Swaying back and forth and moving according to the waves in the ocean, and I don’t really know what mysterious location I’m gonna end up at. The minimalist vibrating synths just pump your body with all of these emotions, questioning life and existence. To top things off, DXheaven lent a helping hand in the production of Rugby, providing a solid backbone of thumping beats.

Not only has Brightly ramped up his sound in this new single, he has also ramped up the visual components incorporated for his new work. Using the Giphy API, he created a video for Rugby to celebrate the successful crowdfunding of his latest and most personal record, One For Sorrow, Two For Joy. Built with a mix of Ruby, Node, and React, the music video grabs fresh GIFs in real-time that match the keywords from the song, making every experience unique. Brightly refers to this as the spiritual successor to Tweetflight.

One For Sorrow, Two For Joy will be available 31 May 2016. It isn’t too far away, but yet it still feels like a wait. So, we’ll just have to quench our desire for more with this lovely premiere today.