Eric D. Johnson announced a new Fruit Bats album and shared the title track, “The Landfill”, due out June 12 via Merge. It’s the follow up to last year’s “Baby Man“, and about it, he says, “Full swashbuckling band vibes, laser beams aimed at your heart as usual, all my lyrical preoccupations distilled further down into the heart cavity.”
The first single is the title track, which is accompanied by a video directed by Adam Willis. Johnson says:
This is my 6th video with the great Adam Willis, AKA Brother Willis. Another in our long line of collabs which are often funny with cold opens and strange characters plumbing the depths of the human psyche. The very first brainstorm session, we landed on Close Encounters of the Third Kind as an initial reference. Especially the notion of a man at a crossroads who is haunted by a mysterious shape. Later that morphed into the idea that, for some strange reason, I live a double life as a tortured art star in Europe. And that my music career there is completely unknown. Truth be told, Fruit Bats have had a strange journey as more or less a cult band for a long time. Things have gotten bigger in recent years in North America but we ARE still quite obscure in Europe. This is a less than subtle nod to that fact.
Silly and obscure as these concepts may be – the video still plays to the lyric and feeling of the song. The notions of memory and legacy and following signs that may or may not lead you down the right path. Adam and I always like winking in these videos but the concepts and stories are still kinda poignant at the end of the day.
Fruit Bats album, out June 12th, 2026, on Merge Records
The Fat Angel Sings 