Bright Madness is the third album from the pinch-me-is-this-real improvising trio of Wendy Eisenberg, David Grubbs, and Bonner Kramer. Fresh off their 2025 Big Ears appearance, Squanderers slid on over to Kramer’s adopted hometown of Asheville, North Carolina and laid down the glorious afternoon’s worth of instant compositions that stands before you. It’s the sound of Eisenberg, Grubbs, and Kramer doing their damnedest to dazzle one another, from shell-game sleights of hand to the effortless beauty of “Theme for the Casino at 5 A.M.,” from the ratcheting up of tension and general plot thickening of “Theme for Femme-Presenting Hands” and “Theme for the World’s Consigliere” to the epic “Theme for Nihologisms,” which hints at the scale of Squanderers’ live performances. 

In a recent cover feature on Wendy Eisenberg in The Wire, Grubbs described Squanderers as “a dream of a trio, something that I always hoped I might find in an improvising group. Part of me wants to chalk it up to attitude — Wendy and Kramer having serene confidence in what they produce in real time — but it also has to do with their consummate skills as musicians. The wild, uninhibited flow of ideas from Wendy I’ve experienced when we’ve played as a duo slows down and floats in amber with Squanderers.” Wendy’s take on Squanderers from the same feature? “It’s the most beautiful mermaid shit I’ve ever heard in my life.”

Bright Madness follows If a Body Meet a Body and Skantagio, two full-length Squanderers offerings on Kramer’s Shimmy-Disc label. As Raphael Helfand concluded in his Pitchfork review of If a Body Meet a Body, “What we’re left with is not so much a pristine work of collective genius as a testament to the transcendence that can occur when a group of individual geniuses sit down together with no greater aim than melding their minds for a while. If only all our squanderings could be so fruitful.”