Late last year, Dirty Projectors shared clips of new music, along with the new track “Keep Your Name” The glitchy ballad seems to herald another reinvention for Dave Longstreth’s ever-morphing project. The upcoming record will be their follow-up to 2012’s Swing Lo Magellan as well as the first Dirty Projectors release since guitarist/singer Amber Coffman , who wasn’t credited on “Keep Your Name,” announced plans for her own solo album, City Of No Reply.
On “Keep Your Name,” Dirty Projectors’ first new song in four years, a harmony from that Swing Lo Magellan track is twisted: “We don’t see eye to eye” serves as a harbinger, the sample is a ghost of a feeling. What was a throwaway observational doubt ends up sowing the seeds for a relationship’s end; the signs were there all along.
Sampling a song from your previous album about the strength of a connection on a track about the devastating aftermath of that connection is a bold move, doubly so when the relationship in question has been part of the band’s DNA for the last decade. I’m not going to speculate about what happened between David Longstreth and Amber Coffman, but it’s notable that “Keep Your Name” is the first song in a long while without her voice present. In fact, Longstreth himself isn’t really here, at least not in the way we’ve known him previously. His signature wail is pitched-down in the verses, sped-up in the spoken-word interlude. He sounds like a shell of his former self, despondent and wallowing .
“Keep Your Name” details a breakdown in communication over divergent paths of artistic commerce. “A band is a brand and it licks at our vision of dissonance,” Longstreth sings in the breakdown, stretching out his voice to mimic one of Coffman’s passionately high notes, hinting at her absence. “What I want from art is truth/ What you want is fame.” But even beyond wanting something different out of art, this song is about a relationship between two people who want something different out of life: “You always hurry to grow up/ I think I’ll always just feel kind of the same.” “Keep Your Name” operates as a dialogue between Longstreth’s instinctual and rational halves but, at the end of the day, he’s still just talking to himself, and it sounds impossibly lonely
The Fat Angel Sings 