One of the strangest things you can do with music, among the most feel-good notions ever concocted by humankind, is to make it depressing. Even the blues manages to celebrate rising above, or at least toughing it through, life’s most adverse happenstances and hardships. Then came goth and, later, an endless array of bleak, nihilistic subgenres that all share the same hopeless world view: everything sucks, and here’s why. L.A. trio Glaare embraces the same dark muse that haunts the grooves of Joy Division, the Cure, Zola Jesus, and all the other inward-obsessed oracles of depression, but in a reverb-heavy post-punk context that adds a welcome edge to the usual female-fronted shoegazers they’re compared with. And by reverb, I mean aggressive, just drenched in echoes that vibrate your eardrums like something recorded by Portishead on Xanax, but listened to on LSD. Psychedelic shoegaze, forever turning them from dream pop to something more akin to a fever dream.

The band greatly benefits from Rachael Pierce’s powerful vocals, which somehow manage to rise above the razor-like guitar riffs that drive their new single “Desiree,” from their debut full-length To Deaf and Day, which dropped in October. Their appearance at Blonde Bar on January 21 will be preceded by openers Hexa, an electronic pop project featuring Carrie Gillespie Feller, who in the past three years has also launched bands Pleasure Model (with No Knife’s Mitch Wilson), Hours (with husband Scott Feller), and, recently, Possible Man with a Possible Gun. The bill includes Fearing.