If fate didn’t quite ordain the circumstances for Interpol’s seventh album, it was at least fortunate that the band had happily concluded their Marauder cycle on stage in front of 30 thousand-odd Peruvian fans. Rather than be sent scrambling like so many other musicians on tour or promoting new music, when lockdown clamped in March 2020, Interpol quickly got into a productive mood.
Coming from a group whose early work was characterised by Polish knife-wielders and incarcerated serial killers, you might expect Interpol’s pandemic record to be an emotional tar pit — doubly so, given the presence of towering producer-engineer duo Flood and Moulder on the boards.
But Banks felt the call to push in a “counterbalancing” direction, with paeans to mental resilience and the quiet power of going easy. “The nobility of the human spirit is to recover and rebound,” he says. “Yeah, I could focus on how fucked everything is, but I feel now is the time when being hopeful is necessary, and a still-believable emotion within what makes Interpol Interpol.”
Nashville-based singer Madi Diaz has a new single, “Hangover.” Diaz also announced a North American tour this week.
Diaz states in a press release: “I wrote ‘Hangover’ with Jesse Thomas and Drew Pearson when I was still feeling the lagging throws of heartbreak—the waking up in withdrawal, aching, reeling over a person and all the things that come after it’s over. Sometimes it feels like you’re just stumbling around a city and in every corner there’s a memory. At every table in every restaurant some argument, on every street corner some kiss, at the 7 Eleven some melt down. ‘Hangover’ is about bumping into that old feeling and reliving the less appealing side effects of not being in love with that person anymore.”
She adds, regarding the video: “Joey conjured these huge flashing screens towering around me, making a space for me to get lost in performance and really feel every heartbeat of the song. We were in a world inside of a world. With two generators and 42 feet of LED walls, I’m sure it looked like we were throwing a mini warped tour in my backyard.”
Diaz’s most recent album, “History of a Feeling“, came out last year via ANTI-Records, and it was among our 100 Albums of 2021. Earlier this month, Diaz released “Same History, New Feelings”, an EP consisting of reworkings of tracks from “History of a Feeling“.
Back in January, Goon gifted us with a single called “Garden of Our Neighbour” that preceded a project titled “Paint by Numbers Vol. 1″ which collected the group’s home recordings made during COVID lockdown. While a “Pt. 2” to that record has yet to be announced, the dream-pop ensemble instead revealed plans for a proper album called “Hour of Green Evening” officially drops tomorrow.
Adding producer/engineer Phil Hartunian (Gracie Abrams, Mega Bog, Florist) to the mix, and with Spoon’s Alex Fischel providing backing keys, the resulting record is a dreamy combination of psych rock and muted grunge. “This definitely is a record we’ve always wanted to create,” shares vocalist Kenny Becker, who rejiggered the band’s line-up after 2019’s debut full-length “Heaven Is Humming“. “It was both a joy and a challenge, and we’re deeply proud of it. And we’re unspeakably excited to finally share it with everyone!”
A singer, songwriter, and author whose incendiary music has sound tracked all three seasons of the Netflix show “Sex Education”, Ezra Furman has for years woven together stories of queer discontent and unlikely, fragile intimacies. Ezra Furman is releasing a new album, “All of Us Flames”, due for release August 26th via ANTI-/Bella Union. Ezra shared its fourth single, “Lilac and Black,” via a lyric video.
A press release says “Lilac and Black” concerns “a revenge plot where she and her ‘queer girl gang’ drive out their oppressors and claim a hostile city for themselves.”
Furman elaborates further: “I’ve started to think of us trans women as a kind of secret gang, scattered across the world. Or that we could be that. So I wrote this theme song for us, and gave us some gang colours: “Lilac and Black”. Unfortunately, being trans usually comes with some kind of threat to one’s well-being or even one’s life. The hostility toward us right now is intense and the stakes are high.
This song is an expression of deep solidarity and willingness to defend our lives. Being an inherently peaceful person, I hate to imagine it, but there are times that violent self-defense, or defense of others, is the moral and necessary path. This song is about being ready for that…. It’s also about how being trans so often feels like a war we never asked for. On top of the seemingly endless social stigma and barriers to our general thriving, various governments have now set in motion a concerted movement to virtually outlaw healthy trans existence. Let it be known: we demand safety, resources and dignity, and we are ready to fight for our lives and the lives of others.”
Furman previously shared “All of Us Flames’s” “Point Me Toward the Real” in early March, which was her first single for ANTI-. “Point Me Toward the Real” was about someone getting out of a psychiatric hospital.
Then “Book of Our Names” followed in April. When “All of Us Flames”was announced in May, Furman shared its third single, “Forever in Sunset,” via a video.
Much of the new album was written in the early months of the pandemic. “I had no time alone anymore; my house was super crowded,” Furman said. So she went for drives around Massachusetts to find quiet places to write songs.
“This is a first person plural album,” Furman said. “It’s a queer album for the stage of life when you start to understand that you are not a lone wolf, but depend on finding your family, your people, how you work as part of a larger whole. I wanted to make songs for use by threatened communities, and particularly the ones I belong to: trans people and Jews.”
John Congleton (Angel Olsen, Future Islands, Sharon Van Etten) produced “All of Us Flames”. Furman’s last full-on album was 2019’s Twelve Nudes. In 2021, Furman also surprise released a new EP that featured songs she had written for season 3 of the Netflix show Sex Education. It was fittingly titled Sex Education – Songs from Season 3” and featured three new songs, alongside two songs previously released with her former band Ezra Furman & The Harpoons in 2011. Furman has done the music for all three seasons.
In 2020, Furman shared the official soundtrack for seasons 1 and 2 of “Sex Education“, along with a video for the song “Every Feeling.”
“All of Us Flames” is described as the third part of a trilogy, including 2019’s continuing punk rock fury of 2019’s “Twelve Nudes” and 2018’s The Springsteen-inflected road saga “Transangelic Exodus“.
The band is Sam Durkes, Ezra Furman, Ben Joseph and Jorgen Jorgensen Other contributors: John Congleton: additional keyboards, drum machines Shannon Lay & Debbie Neigher: backing vocals Nathaniel Walcott: Horn Arrangements. Vikram Devasthali: trombone. Josh Johnson: saxophone. Nathaniel Walcott: trumpet.
Seriously impressive… combining a bold sonic vista reminiscent of Springsteen and the lyrical dexterity of Dylan… An album of quality and intensity.” The Sun – 5 stars *****
“This is a celebration of difference and very appealing. Classic heartland rock songwriting in the tradition of Bruce Springsteen and Lou Reed, infused with a passionate underdog spirit.”
The Times – 4 stars ****
“All Of Us Flames crackles with the energy and strength of a woman finding power in a world that has constantly deprived her of it. It feels like a protest album – not one fighting to change an imperfect society, but building one of its own. The i Paper – 4 stars ****
“Ezra Furman is on a roll… All Of Us Flames sparkles… Her observations are succinct, original and fearless.” Mail On Sunday – 5 stars *****
New Zealand four-piece The Beths have shared a video for their new single, “Expert in a Dying Field.” It is the latest release from their forthcoming album of the same name, which will be out on September 16th via Carpark.
“I really do believe that love is learned over time,” states lead singer Elizabeth Stokes in a press release. “In the course of knowing a person you accumulate so much information: their favourite movies, how they take their tea, how to make them laugh, how that makes you feel. And when relationships between people change, or end, all that knowledge doesn’t just disappear.
The phrase ‘Expert in a Dying Field’ had been floating around my head for a few years, I was glad to finally capture it when writing this tune.”
The Beths: Elizabeth Stokes Jonathan Pearce Benjamin Sinclair Tristan Deck
The Beths’ previous album, “Jump Rope Gazers“, came out in 2020 via Carpark Records.
Death Cab for Cutie are releasing a new album, “Asphalt Meadows”, due September 16th via AtlanticRecords. This week they shared the album’s second single, “Here to Forever,” via an amusing video in which frontman Benjamin Gibbard has to press the band’s own vinyl after encountering some incompetent workers at the pressing plant. Lance Bangs directed the video, which also features comedians Natalie Palamides and Courtney Pauroso.
“In every movie I watch from the ’50s/There’s only one thought that swirls around my head now/And that’s that everyone there on the screen/Yeah, everyone there on the screen, well, they’re all dead now,” Gibbard sings at the start of “Here to Forever”.
Gibbard had this to say about the song in a press release: “It’s a song both about our impermanence and the anxiety of these times. It’s also about wanting to believe in something bigger even when it feels like nothing is out there.”
Previously Death Cab for Cutie had shared the album’s first single, “Roman Candles,” Then they shared a music video for the song that was shot in one take and featured the band performing the song while roman candle fireworks explode around them.
John Congleton (St. Vincent, Sharon Van Etten) produced “Asphalt Meadows“, which is the follow-up to 2018’s “Thank You For Today”.
Formed in Bellingham, WA in 1997, Death Cab for Cutie almost immediately entered the ranks of the era’s definitive bands, fuelled in large part by the remarkable power of co-founder, vocalist, guitarist, and lead songwriter Benjamin Gibbard’s complex, often bittersweet songcraft. “Asphalt Meadows” is their tenth studio album and finds them exploring further into their own unique sound,
Gibbard was instrumental in helping us all get through the first year of the pandemic, especially when we were all under lockdown, with his regular “Live From Home” livestreams performed in 2020 at first daily and then weekly from his home studio.
Formed in London a decade ago, Petrol Girls aren’t just your average paint-by-numbers punk band. The four-piece—Ren Aldridge, Liepa Kuraitė, Joe York, and Zock Astpai—took their name from the Pétroleuses, quasi-mythical lower-class female supporters of France’s revolutionary government the Paris Commune, which seized power in March 1871 and remained there for just over two months. The Pétroleuses were blamed for setting buildings on fire in solidarity with the Paris Commune as it was falling, though there was no evidence to suggest any women had actually committed arson. That didn’t stop a number of them being put on trial, however, with one being executed for her supposed involvement.
It’s a perfect representation of patriarchy at work, but it also illustrates the radical politics that inspire Petrol Girls’ vicious songs. And while the band may not set fire to buildings, those songs are nevertheless utterly incendiary. “Baby” is the band’s third full-length and, sadly, seethes with righteous anger at the state of the world today. Perhaps it’s the title of pre-album single “Baby, I Had An Abortion” that will stand out most, for obvious reasons—not least because of what’s happening with Roe v. Wade in the US right now—but from beginning to end this is a record that doesn’t shy from telling the ugly, sad truth about the mess we’re in. It’s—pun actually not intended—incredibly fiery stuff that walks the walk as much as it talks the talk, marking Petrol Girls out as one of the most important and inspiring political punk acts around today.
Here, vocalist Ren Aldridge talks us through “Baby’s” 10 tracks. When the revolution comes, you can bet she’ll be right on the front lines.
1. “Preachers”
“Preachers” sets the tone for the direction [Guitarist Joe York] wanted to push the album in musically. It’s based on a very minimal but incessantly repetitive riff, inspired more by electronic genres than rock, eventually building to a more rocking chorus. It also really showcases the more playful approach I wanted to take lyrically on a lot of this record, and kicks back at the holier-than-thou attitude people sometimes give off in radical left communities, which ironically can feel a lot like a church village at times.
2. “Feed My Fire”
This one’s musically pretty unhinged, switching between stressful verses and an almost comical pop-rock chorus. [Drummer Zock] even got his woodblock in there at one point. And, miraculously, a cellist happened to stop by the studio with his cello, meaning Joe could fulfill his idea for a cello line through the verses. Lyrically, I was playing with the imagery of my fire as something I need to keep burning without it getting out of control and reducing me to ash—i.e. burn out—which I was recovering from as we wrote the record. It’s a reflection of the push, push, push collapse cycle I’m stuck in. The outro is one of my favourite bits on the record—the kind of gospel-style harmonies are so over the top and make it even more unhinged, especially after the totally brutal banshee section before!
3. “Baby, I Had an Abortion”
All credit to Joe for coming up with the idea of adding “Baby” to this chorus lyric. It’s the absolute cherry on top of this deliberately taunting and defiantly celebratory pro-abortion banger. The idea for this track came directly from confrontations I’ve had with pro-lifers since having my own abortion in 2018. I bumped into a pro-life demo one morning, and found myself screaming “I had an abortion and I’m not sorry!” at them. I continued doing this at counter-demos but it felt too serious, I didn’t want to dignify them with a serious response.
So the idea for this track pretty much grew from my desire to counter-demo with dance routines and witch costumes! We’ve been using this track and related merch to fundraise for Abortion Without Borders and Brigid Alliance. And the song itself is an attack on the shame and stigma surrounding abortion, which is preyed on when politicians build laws against us.
4. “Clowns”
We built this one up around another one of Joe’s repetitive unhinged riffs. It sounded like a deranged fairground full of clowns to me, so I started messing around with the lyrics to “Stuck in the Middle with You,” but from the perspective of the clowns on the left. It started as a joke but those lyrics actually reworked perfectly to ridicule the political “middle” who act like the left are “just as bad as the right” and denounce any kind of political action as silly or pointless. I also had to think of the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army!
5. “Unsettle”
Despite being built up around another playful riff with disco-beat drums, this ended up being one of the most introspective tracks on the record. It’s something about wanting to change the direction that your life is heading, but worrying what you might lose on the way.
6. “Fight for Our Lives”
The idea for this song grew directly from the femicide demonstrations I take part in here in Graz, Austria. I’ve painted the place and date of death of so many victims of femicide onto bed sheets to then carry through the streets as banners. Musically, the heaviness of this track reflects the heaviness of the topic; with a stripped back section to make way for the building gang vocal of “You don’t own us” before hitting the choir-like chorus vocal of “We fight for our lives.”
We were honoured to have feminist musician and activist Janey Starling feature on this track, and specifically wrote lyrics to honour her Dignity for Dead Women campaign and the resulting press guidelines she created to change the way the media reports on fatal domestic abuse. Her strategic and visionary activism against gender-based violence is changing the world, and we’re so grateful to have her on board! Robin [Gatt] made the bass sound really heavy by tuning down to Bb—combined with the guitar sounds, it sounds atonal and gnarly, in contrast to the very melodic bridge and chorus.
7. “Violent by Design”
Thankfully, Janey co-wrote the lyrics to this track with me, as it was both a rhythmical nightmare and politically very challenging in terms of what we wanted to get across. Essentially this track is an attempt to speak from my position as a middle class white woman to other similarly privileged people, and incite us to reject the idea that the police protect us, both in solidarity with communities who are routinely brutalized by the police and in recognition that the police are not part of the solution to violence against women and marginalised genders—they are part of the problem. The trial of PC Wayne Couzens who used his police powers to abduct, rape, and murder Sarah Everard took place during our first week at the studio, and on our last day the news reported that the latest femicide in Austria had been committed by a police officer. Abolitionist feminism now!
8. “One or the Other”
This track is another great distillation of the musical direction Joe was pushing with this record. It’s fun, incessant, and deranged! It features some very weird effects in the end section, including some great robotic backing vocals from Zock. As a feminist band, we’ve always stood against the gender binary, and this track pushes that idea to challenging binary thinking in general.
9. “Sick & Tired”
This song is pure catharsis for me, especially the sung chorus at the end. The riff was actually something Joe already had when we were writing our last album, and is a nod to “Restless” from our first record. The spoken vocal on the verses was inspired by Listener, and is an exploration of all the things I’m sick and tired of that are literally making me sick. I was recovering from a pretty serious bout of depression and burnout when we wrote this record, and I truly believe there are a lot of political reasons why I ended up in that state. Mental health is so often individualized, but who is really coping under capitalism?
10. “Bones”
Joe sent over the guitar for this chorus during the winter lockdown in early 2021 when we were struggling a lot mentally. I really connected to it emotionally, and wrote the chorus lyrics of “Take away the noise and I am bones / Built the rhythms of my life on all this” over the top, encapsulating a lot of what I was feeling at the time. It ended up being a challenging track to finish, but I love hearing all of our voices belting that chorus, and I think, as a reflection on the ups and downs of being a musician, it works as a perfect album closer.
Blondie shared the original demo of their track “Go Through It” that was originally recorded in 1980. It comes from the forthcoming box set “Blondie: Against the Odds 1974-1982“, which is out August 26th via UMe and The NumeroGroup. It’s the first proper archive from the punk trailblazers, spawned from the two decades worth of material gathering dust in Chris Stein’s Woodstock barn.
The box set includes 124 songs and 36 previously unreleased recordings. There’s the band’s first basement studio session and a bunch of outtakes and alternate versions, including the one we’re hearing today. “Go Through It” made its way onto the A-side of their 1980 album “Autoamerican”, which was a concept album focused on American pop culture.
From first ever authorized and in-depth archive in Blondie’s history, this deluxe 4LP features the very best of the out-takes & rarties from the Super Deluxe Collectors’ Edition, remastered from the original analogue tapes and cut at Abbey Road Studios. Available on 4LP black vinyl with 112 page book featuring an exhaustive look at Blondie’s international notoriety via picture sleeves and regional pressings.
The London trio’s third album is full of hallucinogenic scenes where jazz, prog, electronic, and punk pretzel around each other until it looks like one musical gordian knot.
Black Midi continues to be a genre atom smasher on their third album, “Hellfire“. On each successive record, the group has refused to settle on just rock, jazz, electronic, or punk music. Their 2019 debut “Schlagenheim” was constructed from an unhinged series of improvisational jam sessions, while 2021’s “Cavalcade” then shifted to more closely considered prog-rock night terrors. Black Midi never sticks to one sound, and that’s part of what’s so appealing or confounding about them, depending on who you’re talking to.
On “Hellfire“, the London group embodies the phrases yelped by vocalist/guitarist Geordie Greep at the beginning of the record: “There’s always something… an odd twitch, hearing loss, a ringing noise, new flesh.”
The band’s Geordie Greep explains in a press release: “‘Sugar/Tzu’ imagines that in 2163 it’s possible to see a championship fight between two 600 lb men. Albeit in a so-called ‘Leadweight’ division. The fight is between Sun Sugar and Sun Tzu; the latter being a fan of the Chinese general, hoping to channel his strength; and the former looking to continue the lineage of Sugar Ray Robinson, Leonard etc.
“Present at their battle is a young boy who stands just over three feet tall. At ringside, he briefly exchanges a glance with Sun Sugar, who, in perhaps an attempt to inspire, comes over to the boy and shakes his hand. It is then revealed, as the contender walks back to the action, that the boy is in fact a killer. He takes a small pistol from his little jacket and shoots the man in the back, honour be damned. The boy believes this not to be a cruel act, but a virtuous one, with his interference giving the audience an ultimate, rare entertainment.
“As Sun Sugar hits the deck, the crowd cheer and scream, believing this only to be the result of a particularly vicious shot from Sun Tzu.
“There is a little joke here. It is regular for a boxing audience to bemoan an early stoppage, the official stepping in to save a fighter who could’ve gone on. And while there is the surface agreement of most that ‘it was the right thing to do,’ there seems to be often left unsaid the fact that we actually do want to see a brutal knockout. And in the split second where these one-shot, punch-perfect, coma-inducing blows do occur, there is an undeniable rush. The boy in this story feels he is a hero for giving the crowd what they all really want. This is not to say the song is a critique of boxing or anything of the like—I love the sport—but it is an interesting and rare phenomenon worth exploring.”
The title track prominently features an ominous pipe organ, which is reminiscent of the soundtracks for deadly Roman gladiatorial games. This type of tension ratchets up throughout the album’s 38-minute runtime while influences drop on the listener in waves, with bits of early Genesis, Captain Beefheart, and ’70s jazz-fusion icons Magma tumbling over each other as each track is revealed in full.
The concept for the album is set during a war with vivid military characters serving as the nervous mouthpieces of each track. The subject matter of each song is on the seedier side—“The Defence” and “Dangerous Liaisons” are from the perspective of a brothel owner and hired killer, respectively. World War I and Dickensian poetry feature prominently as influences for Greep, and his delivery remains truly alien. “Still” is the most melodic the dark album ever gets as it contorts and changes shape.
It’s a modern mutation on a traditional strain of ’70s rock and jazz jamming, but Black Midi remain mostly appealing three albums into their ascendant career. It’ll be intriguing to see what they mutate into for their fourth effort.
Los Angeles indie band Goon have been staying busy, debuting a new line-up earlier this year with their “Paint By Numbers, Vol. 1” EP, and sharing a Bandcamp exclusive “Six Covers” EP in support of the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund. Last month they returned again with another new single, “Angelnumber 1210,” alongside news of the band’s sophomore LP, “Hour of Green Evening”, out July 15th. Today they’re back again with the record’s second single, “Ochre,” along with an accompanying video.
“Ochre” is a bit of a different take on the placid suburban soundscapes found throughout “Hour of Green Evening”. The band’s latest effort is more sparse and nocturnal, capturing the surreal unreality of a sleepless night (“I wandered out of bed / Cause there’s a firing line in my head / And it worked for a minute / Open my evil eye”). In this setting, frontman Kenny Becker and company find an alluring moon-lit beauty, conjured via haunting vocal melodies, the rhythm section’s playful swing, and a sweeping piano solo from Spoon’s Alex Fischel.
Becker explains of “Ochre”, “This track centers around anxieties and depression. Like that feeling when you’re laying in bed wide awake at 3 am and your mind is racing so much that you just have to get up and walk around.
To me, the ‘arrow’ refers to the inevitable passage of time. Knowing that every moment will eventually pass, and therefore just trying to focus on the present. This was an especially fun one to record because it’s the only Goon song so far that swings. Also, our brilliant buddy Alex Fischel plays piano on this track, and he totally improvised that piano bit at the very end.
I shot this video using a junky little point and shoot camera made in 2009. To me, its lo-fi digital grittiness feels very fitting with the introspective and longing vibe of the song. All the songs on this album correlate pretty strongly with specific times of day. I always pictured “Ochre” occurring somewhere in that formless, transitional moment between night and day, where everything is like hauntingly blue.
“Hour Of Green Evening” out everywhere on July 15th.
