You don’t need to be familiar with N.Y.C. to understand Beach Fossils’ long-time-coming new album, Somersault. But it doesn’t hurt. The rock band’s already-classic 2010 eponymous debut was hinged on a sleepy yearning for the pastoral, and their follow-up Clash The Truth channeled the jittery energy of a weird millennial house party. But Somersault, due out June 2nd on frontman Dustin Payseur’s own Bayonet Records label , is the aural equivalent of riding across the East River in a rickety subway car at sunset. It just feels like life in New York.
Here, the band’s usually cloudy production is crisper, and the arrangements are bigger than ever. That’s at least partly because the typically overprotective Payseur, 31, found himself more receptive to collaboration: with his bandmates Jack Smith and Tommy Davidson; and with a slew of guest musicians, like a string trio and indie rapper Cities Aviv, whose presence gives the record a cool, cavernous feeling.
It’s a lot about myself, I guess. It’s about me facing depression head on. I was trying to work on music and I was feeling so fucking low. Just like, in the dirt. I couldn’t get anything to happen. My creativity was completely zapped. I was kind of breaking down. I hadn’t really been sleeping. I started working on this song, and I really liked how it was feeling. I put lyrics down. I did the whole song really fast. It was one of the only songs on the record that I did in one or two sittings. I realized if I just kind of faced how I was feeling, I could use it to my advantage. I could let it out.
I remember reading once that William S. Burroughs considered all of his books part of one universe, and one story. They work all together; they’re not really separate. That’s what the songs that I’ve written for Beach Fossils are like. A very consistent theme throughout is me being open and honest about my personal life. It’s about my life, and about my friends
I think this one is me being more open about my own shortcomings and flaws. And kind of like, dealing with that. I’m not offering any sort of answer or solution — it’s just me, how I’m living now. These are the things I’m dealing with, with people in my life right now. It’s open and honest in a different way.
Beach Fossils “Down The Line” from their album “Somersault” out June 2nd, 2017.
There’s some big, baroque-sounding songs on the record. How did the string arrangements come together?
We wrote the string parts ourselves, in one session. It was completely insane and I can’t believe we actually did that. We spent 17 hours writing the sheet music. None of us had written it before, and we had a very, very basic knowledge of sheet music. We only had a few hours to sleep before we went to the studio, and I couldn’t really sleep be cause I kept thinking, Okay, I’m going to go into the studio, show these professional musicians this sheet music and they are gonna have no fucking idea what this is supposed to be. It’s gonna be a mess. But then they started warming up, and they started playing the parts. I was like, Holy fuck, that’s what I wrote. It was a very emotional moment for all of us.
Jack Doyle Smith
Tommy Davidson
The Fat Angel Sings 