Hand Habits, the project of Los Angeles-based musician Meg Duffy, has announced their new album Fun House. It’s out October 22 via Saddle Creek. Today’s announcement comes with the release of the lead single ‘Aquamarine’, which is accompanied by a V Haddad-directed video. Check it out below and scroll down for the LP’s cover art and tracklist.
“What originally started as a minimally arranged acoustic ballad, ‘Aquamarine’ evolved into the story of certain events in life, what informs my identity, the silence in the questions left unanswered that become the shape of understanding who I am,” Duffy explained in a statement. “It was my goal to cloak some of the perils of mortality (lyrically) in a musical landscape that didn’t require the listener for a large amount of patience, to bring grief into the metaphorical club. We filmed this video in my aunt’s bar and club in upstate New York, linking the origin and lineage themes in the song with the visuals of changing identities and characters in a space I used to wander as a teen.”
Fun House was produced by Sasami Ashworth (SASAMI) and Kyle Thomas (King Tuff), while Mike Hadreas of Perfume Genius contributes vocals on ‘No Difference’ and ‘Just To Hear You’. “I felt a massive shift in the way that I was seeing the world and seeing myself, moving through certain emotional patterns and behavioural patterns, and really taking them apart,” Duffy added. “Sasami empowered me to take up a lot of different sonic spaces and challenged me to rethink these limitations that I had about my own identity. I wouldn’t allow myself to step into certain roles because of the little box I was putting myself in based on all of these false narratives that I had come to believe about myself. I think this also coincides with my trans identity too, because so much of that journey for me has been me really fighting against what I’m not ‘allowed’ to be.”
Duffy elaborated on the concept behind the new album:
I like that the idea of a ‘fun house’ can have so many different connotations. It’s disorienting, it’s filled with all these different rooms with different energies and emotions. There’s a risk that there will be manipulation happening to your environment, but you sign up for it. I really liked the idea that we could take risks, that these songs could sound very different but still make sense together. A lot of the demos for this record were really just folk songs — pretty slow and sparse — but the fun was thinking about what they could become. It was like, what if we wrapped this really traumatic, at times literal, loss of identity story from your life in a dance song? Or what if we layered this secret confession about your compulsive behavioural patterns within a beautiful acapella beach boys arrangement? Yes, let’s do that.
Hand Habits’ last album was 2019’s placeholder. Earlier this year, Duffy released the dirt EP and teamed up with Joel Fort for their self-titled yes/and project.
Fun House Cover Artwork:
Fun House Tracklist:
1. More Than Love
2. Aquamarine
3. Just To Hear You [feat. Perfume Genius]
4. No Difference
5. Graves
6. False Start
7. Clean Air
8. Concrete & Feathers
9. The Answer
10. Gold/Rust
11. Control
