New York duo Lowertown have announced a new album, Ugly Duckling Union, which is set for release on May 22 via their new label home, Summer Shade. The nervously infatuated lead single, ‘I Like You A Lot’, is out now. Check out a video for it below, and scroll down for the album cover and tracklist.
The new track “was written about the hope of a new crush, and the intoxicating feelings of admiring and fantasizing about someone from afar,” according to the band. “Loving someone without yet knowing them, and being filled with the idea of the potential time spent together. This thinking can become obsessive and compulsive, almost like a sickness taking over the body, but maybe not in a particularly bad way. It is also about the insecurity and the uncertainty about these feelings being reciprocated or un-reciprocated.”
I interviewed Lowertown in 2021 for an Artist Spotlight, and then again the following year for an inspirations feature around their debut LP, I Love to Lie. I don’t think they’ve ever done anything nearly as conceptual as Ugly Duckling Union, which is described by a press release as “the conceptual world of Dale the duckling protagonist and his companions as they attempt to band together to defeat LBH, a tyrannical media corporation set on separating and isolating in their pursuit of control.” It also comes with a playable Minecraft world, a handbook, plush dolls, and drawn comics by Doctor Nowhere (Silas Orion).
The new album was fully written and recorded by Olivia Osby and Avsha Weinberg. “Our home has been the people who make us feel understood, and the music that makes us feel understood,” Osby reflected. “I feel like Avsha and I have just been two misfits doing stuff together, and I feel like this music is for people like us—it’s for the misfit toys.”
Ugly Duckling Union Cover Artwork:
Ugly Duckling Union Tracklist:
1. Mice Protection
2. Worst Friend
3. Echo of Desire
4. Forgive Yourself
5. Big Thumb
6. Cover You
7. I Like You A Lot
8. (I Like To Play With) Mutts
9. DIPSH*T
10. Anything Good Takes Blood
11. Found A
12. Some Things Never End
