Vents MagaZine Music and Entertainment Magazine
Related Articles
Picture it: some godforsaken hospital room with fluorescent lights that flicker just enough to make you wonder if you’re seeing things. The walls are beige, or maybe off-white, but the kind of off-white that has seen things, absorbed things. Jeremy Climer knows this room. You know this room. And in “Paper Gowns”, the second single from his upcoming album Before You Turn Out the Lights, he makes sure you feel every inch of it.
Climer has been around. Dodge Ball, Vice Tricks, Kittenhead—punk bands, sweat-drenched basements, cheap beer, cigarette smoke clinging to denim jackets. He cut his teeth on that scene, playing guitar, howling into microphones, and waiting for someone to throw a bottle. Then, a solo album in 2022, pop-punk recorded at home, mixed by none other than Bill Stevenson. 2023, self-released work—punk, goth, Americana—genres bending and blurring like tail lights in the rain. Now, 2025 looms, and with it, Before You Turn Out the Lights, recorded in Bloomington, Indiana, under the watchful ear of producer Paul Mahern.
Enter “Paper Gowns”. A song that should be slow, should be mournful, but isn’t. Mahern wouldn’t let it be. Instead, it moves, shakes, pulses with something that feels like urgency. Americana-adjacent, classic country-tinted, but only if country music still knew how to be honest.
“Here I am, it’s all coming down to the doctors and machines… and the ugly (bloody) paper gowns.”
A gut punch, but set to a rhythm that keeps your foot tapping. Cognitive dissonance in three and a half minutes. The band—handpicked by Mahern—plays like they’ve been together for years. Heidi Lynne Gluck on bass, piano, backing vocals; Shannon Hayden on cello and electric guitar; Devon Ashley keeping time on drums and percussion; David England leading the charge on guitar. A guitar solo cuts through like a scalpel, precise but not sterile, a brief moment of defiance against the inevitable.
The song was born in the moment. Climer walked into the studio with little more than voice memos, trusting the room, trusting Mahern, trusting the magic that happens when musicians stop thinking and start playing. And the magic delivered.
It’s an upbeat song about dying. An Americana song made by a punk rocker. A classic country song that isn’t trying to be nostalgic, just real.
This isn’t the first single—“From a Bedroom in Denver” came first, another piece of the puzzle that is Before You Turn Out the Lights. A record that promises to be raw, unfiltered, the kind of album that doesn’t ask for your attention so much as it demands it.
But “Paper Gowns”—this one sticks. Because we all know that room. The one with the flickering lights and the walls that have absorbed too much. And Climer? He’s not just singing about it. He’s making you sit in it, feel it, nod your head to it. And that might just be the most punk thing he’s ever done.
Jennifer Munoz
