Crooked Fingers have announced their first album in nearly 15 years. Swet Deth, the follow-up to 2011’s Breaks in the Armor, is set for release on February 27 via Merge. Today’s announcement comes with the release of the anthemic new single ‘Cold Waves’, which features label head Mac McCaughan (of Superchunk). Check it out below.
Reflecting on ‘Cold Waves’, Eric Bachmann said in a statement: “I dreamed of a beautiful, colossal, six-winged inamorata rising off the horizon above the ashes of the dying earth; arctic lasers pulsating from her eyes and fire streaming from her fingertips, freezing then melting then freezing everything again in an instant; lighting up the night with death and apocalypse, destroying everything in her path. When I woke I realized I had fallen deeply in love with her, but was worried that it was actually a trap, which – in hindsight – it clearly was.”
In addition to McCaughan, Swet Deth features guest contributions from Sharon Van Etten and the National’s Matt Berninger. Bachmann worked with Jeremy Wheatley on drums and percussion and Jon Rauhouse on pedal steel, while his wife, Liz Durrett, contributes vocals on ‘Hospital’. The album’s cover is one of several drawings Bachmann’s son discovered one afternoon after returning from school.
“There were crows and sinister figures with scythes and tombstones, and in the center, there was a strange, lush green tree growing out of all of this red and black,” Bachmann explained. “On one of them, he had written ‘DETH, SWET DETH,’ and everything clicked in my head.”
About opening up the songs to outside collaborators, Bachmann commented: “I’m introverted, I’m shy, and I don’t want to waste anybody’s time, so it wasn’t the easiest thing to do. I had to follow the sound – the way a bassline drove through a song or the way a lyric would sound in another voice – and break through some of my own barriers to make it happen.”
Swet Deth Cover Artwork:
Swet Deth Tracklist:
1. Cold Waves
2. From All Ways
3. Spray Tan Speed Queen (In a German Car)
4. Insomnia
5. Empty Love and Cheap Thrills
6. Haunted
7. Hospital
8. (I’m Your) Bodhisattva
9. Lena
10. Steady Now
