It seems Hugo gets upset when the date in the frontmatter is improperly formatted.
BlissJs appends the date as :
date: "2022-01-13 11:24:00 am"
timezone: "America/New_York"
When I change the date to either
date: 22-01-13 or date: "22-01-13 12:12:12 +0500 it parses just fine