Injury Reserve have announced a new album titled By The Time I Get To Phoenix. The record was largely completed before the tragic death of group member Stepa J. Groggs, who passed away last summer. The follow-up to Injury Reserve’s 2019 self-titled debut is out September 15 via Loma Vista. Below, listen to the new single ‘Knees’ and find the album’s cover artwork.
The new album will feature Groggs’ contributions, as well as collaborations with Zelooperz, Body Meat, Sadpony, and black midi drummer Morgan Simpson. Surviving band members Ritchie With a T and Parker Corey wrote in a statement:
While touring europe in 2019, we had a show in Stockholm that had been booked in the back of an Italian restaurant instead of a typical venue. To match a certain lack of production we pivoted the show into our own improvisatory take on a DJ set and ended up performing a song none of us had heard before, the board recording of which became the grounding for a new album. Over the next few months, we locked in and put together the 11 songs that that album would eventually become. Those early months of 2020 had about as much turmoil for us as one could expect last year, and between the general social upheaval, loss of livelihoods and family tragedy, the record we made carried these weights. Once the tracklist came together and we started to make sense of it, one of the last phone conversations we had with Groggs was over his love for the repurposing of Isaac Hayes’ “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” to title the album. Shortly thereafter we were struck with his loss and of course everything was put on hold, but eventually, we regathered and felt most comfortable finishing this album we had made as it still resonated fully (in some respects even taking on what felt like haunting pre-echoes) and above all else stayed true to his constant insistence while recording to simply ‘make some weird shit.’ All this said obviously this album is dedicated to Jordan Alexander Groggs, aka Stepa J. Groggs with one p better get it right. Typing here feels small in the space of your real physical absence but you, your voice and your words continue to echo around us all thru these recordings and so many others and everything else. thank you for your time, we love and miss you, of course of course.
Things Take Time, Take Time will mark Barnett’s first studio LP since 2018’s Tell Me How You Really Feel. We’ve already heard the album’s lead single and opening track, ‘Rae Street’.
Indigo De Souza has released a new song, ‘Real Pain’, the latest offering from her forthcoming album Any Shape You Take. Check it out below.
“‘Real Pain’ is about facing grief and loss and having compassion for yourself in that space,” De Souza said the new track in a statement. “It’s about learning to be unafraid of experiencing a full spectrum of emotion, and welcoming the way it teaches you and changes you. For one of the sections in the song, I put out an invitation for people to anonymously send me voice memos of ‘screams, yells, and anything else’. I layered the voices on top of one another to embody a kind of collective experience. I felt an incredible catharsis hearing their voices stacked with mine. While we live such separate lives, we are connected in the way that we all navigate immense amounts of pain and love and fear in our bodies every day. It can be hard to be a person! It’s okay to acknowledge that sometimes. It’s okay to feel things fully and to allow others space to do the same.”
Any Shape You Take arrives August 27 via Saddle Creek. It includes the previously released tracks ‘Kill Me’ and ‘Hold U’.
Danny Elfman has enlisted Trent Reznor for a new version of his single ‘True’, which originally appeared on Elfman’s recently released album Big Mess. The track arrives with an accompanying Aron Johnson-directed visual that incorporates elements of Sarah Sitkin’s original video for the song. Check it out below.
“This is the first duet/collaboration I’ve ever done in my life, so to do it with Trent was a real surprise and a treat,” Elfman said in a press release. “He’s always been a big inspiration to me, not to mention he has one of my all-time favorite singing voices.”
Big Red Machine, the project of the National’s Aaron Dessner and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last night to perform their recent single ‘Phoenix’. They also debuted a new track called ‘New Auburn’ for a web exclusive. Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold, Anaïs Mitchell, The Westerlies, The National’s Scott Devendorf, drummer JT Bates, and keyboardist Nick Lloyd joined the duo for both performances, which you can watch below.
Big Red Machine are set to release their new album How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last?, which follows their self-titled 2018 debut, on August 27. The record features collaborations with Taylor Swift, Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold, Sharon Van Etten, and more.
Molly Payton has announced a new mini-album titled Slack. It’s out October 1, and the new single ‘You Cut Me So Much Slack’ is out today alongside an accompanying Taylor Mansfield-directed video, following on from the previously released ‘Honey’ (which was our Song of the Week). Check it out below.
“‘You Cut Me So Much Slack’ is a song I wrote initially for my EP Porcupine, but decided just before it came out that it fit better in this project,” Payton explained in a press release. “In Porcupine when I wrote about friendships and relationships I was placing a lot of blame on other people, whereas my coming project Slack is more self-reflective and centres around taking responsibility for your own faults in order to grow. My anxiety used to make it almost impossible to communicate and express my feelings to someone, and when I tried it would never come out the way I wanted it to. That’s what this song is driven by, that frustration and desperation of wanting someone but not being able to tell them.”
spill tab has teamed up with Canadian rapper Tommy Genesis for a new song called ‘Indecisive’. It’s set to appear on the singer-songwriter’s upcoming second EP, set for release this Autumn via Arista Records. Check it out below.
“My producer and I wanted to make something with dummy fast drums and we sort of just went from there,” spill tab explained in a statement. “We had all the sections we wanted but were missing a verse and I just really wanted someone to rap over it and go hard and I also didn’t want it to be me. I think my team sent the song over to Tommy’s camp and she loved it and was down to hop on it, and I’ve been a phat fan of her stuff and her new song too, so it was a divine match made in heaven.”
“It can’t get much worse than this,” Conor Murphy croons on ‘At Least We Found the Floor’, an acoustic highlight off Foxing’s new album, Draw Down the Moon. The record takes its name from Margot Adler’s book about contemporary Paganism, but you don’t need to be interested in spirituality, relate to Murphy’s past reflections on Catholicism, or have played Dungeons & Dragons a single time to enjoy what the band has to offer on their latest LP, whose rollout included encouraging fans to partake in a series of online rituals. You don’t even need to be acquainted with emo’s complicated history or know that much about the band’s unique trajectory to get some of the metacommentary on the album, though digging through Foxing’s discography – from their celebrated 2013 debut The Albatross to their phenomenal 2018 LP Nearer My God – will only enhance the experience. When both the musical arrangements and the lyrical sentiments are as strikingly immediate as they are resonant, it feels like you’ve come across something that simultaneously exists in its own universe yet feels connected to everything that came before it.
For an album featuring 10 variations on the theme of “cosmic significance,” it’s remarkable that Draw Down the Moon never veers into conceptual vagueness or self-indulgence. As a whole, it’s less of a stylistic shift than a refinement of the qualities that arguably made Nearer My God their most accessible effort to date; by toning down some of the chaotic density of that record and delivering one stadium-sized hook after another, they’ve managed to make its populist framing feel convoluted by comparison. But the new album is still a sprawling, ambitious collection of songs, one whose genre-eschewing boldness is always in service to something bigger than artistic validation and whose infectiousness is more than just a bid for mainstream success. Foxing seem all too aware that these metrics have little bearing in today’s music economy for them to care about anything other than their own creative instincts.
And once again, those instincts help them reach thrilling heights. Produced by the band’s guitarist Eric Hudson and completed with John Congleton and Manchester Orchestra’s Andy Hull, the album’s soaring melodies, indie disco grooves, and manic breakdowns come together to provide a vessel for Murphy’s existential concerns. Rather than belying its own complexity, the album’s reliance on the repetition of pop aligns with the inescapable nature of Murphy’s thoughts, addressing, through different lenses, the same desperate need for connection in the face of the vastness of the cosmos. Even the songs that felt baffling as singles shine through in the context of the album: on the danceable ‘Where the Lightning Strikes Twice’, Murphy sings, “With everything we gave it/ It’s hard not to be devastated,” but the track keeps chugging along, propelled by a sense of electrifying ambition. ‘Beacons’ is an equally driving piece of synth-rock that begins by suggesting the other side of that coin (“I was floating there for so long/ King of nothing”) before hitting with the force of a euphoric revelation: “For the first time I felt alive/I thought I couldn’t move my feet/ But I’m running with you now, we’re a stampede.” Murphy’s voice is impassioned and raw, as if energized by the song’s forward momentum.
In reality, the album feels more like a downward spiral. “If you should fall, I’ll follow behind/ We’ll go down there together,” Murphy sings on the Passion Pit-esque ‘Go Down Together’, one of many attempts to soften the weight of emptiness by finding strength in unity. Throughout the album, “down” remains an undefined place as well as the only direction, but it doesn’t matter so long as you’re running with someone. ‘Bialystok’ – named after the largest city in Poland and apparently the farthest the band has been from their home of St. Louis – meanders for the first minute or so before Murphy is struck by the realization that “Without you, I feel so homesick everywhere I go,” any hint of melancholy quickly overshadowed by the love that fills the “fiery core of why.” It’s the wonderful detail Murphy includes halfway through that colours the whole song: “I was just thinking about arguing in the kitchen/ Just to be the one that you argue with/ Is a miracle in itself/ Sacred insignificance/ Steeped in cosmic bliss.”
Given all this, one might be slightly taken aback by the cynical tone of ‘At Least We Found the Floor’ – have the band really done everything in their power to capture the lowest of lows, or do they keep swerving away? But even at its most direct and optimistic, Murphy’s unhinged performances are enough to suggest that everything could fall apart at any moment. Besides, there’s something refreshing about the band’s attempt at turning emo’s nihilistic tendencies into a source of not just catharsis, but comfort. ‘At Least We Found the Floor’ calls back to the album’s magnificent opening track, ‘737’, but instead of building to an explosive climax, it retains a quiet composure, even with the acceptance that, yeah, it actually can get a hell of a lot worse. As far as the music goes, at least, it can only get so much better than this – though as always with Foxing, you never really know what might come next.
Chastity Belts’ Julia Shapiro has announced her sophomore album, Zorked. The follow-up to 2019’s Perfect Version is out October 15 via Suicide Squeeze Records. Today’s announcement comes with the release of the new single, ‘Come With Me’, alongside a music video directed by Ertugrul Yaka. Check it out below and scroll down for the record’s cover art and tracklist.
Shapiro said of the new song in a statement:
Last September I went on a backpacking trip with my cousins, up in the mountains of Colorado, and one of the days we were out there we did mushrooms. I ended up having a pretty insane trip, but I had the worst time when I was coming up on them. I kept seeing evil faces in the mountains. This song was partially inspired by that experience, but it’s really about anytime I’m stuck in a negative headspace and spiraling out of control. It’s about giving in and letting your mind take you to the darkest places. The song itself is really evil sounding, with super dissonant chords, which inspired the darker lyrics. I’ve never written a song that sounds like this. This might be my favorite drumbeat on the album… it just gives the song a nice groove. Melina Duterte (who recorded/mixed the album) had the idea to add some staccato synth throughout the whole track, which adds another dimension to it.
Of the video, Ertugrul Yaka added: “Julia found me on one of the freelancer sites. It came as a surprise to me because I’ve been listening to Chastity Belt since 2016. So I know her from the Chastity Belt. It was a great experience for me. The video is about the war between good trips and bad trips. When you’re looking for joy, two kinds of feelings are always chasing you at the end. When you reach joy, a piece from your inside breaks off; I mean, it’s giving you something and taking another thing from your inside. I made this video based on my own experience.”
Zorked Cover Artwork:
Zorked Tracklist:
1. Death (XIII)
2. Come With Me
3. Wrong Time
4. Someone
5. Reptile! Reptile!
6. Pure Bliss
7. Hellscape
8. Do Nothing About It
9. Zorked
10. Hall of Mirrors
Three members of Chromatics have announced the band’s breakup. Vocalist Ruth Radelet, guitarist Adam Miller, and drummer Nat Walker have all signed a statement that was shared on Radalet and Miller’s Instagram accounts.
“After a long period of reflection, the three of us have made the difficult decision to end Chromatics,” their joint statement reads. “We would like to thank all of our fans and the friends we have made along the way – we are eternally grateful for your love and support. This has been a truly unforgettable chapter in our lives, and we couldn’t have done it without you. We are very excited for the future, and look forward to sharing our new projects with you soon.”
Johnny Jewel, who has toured with the group, produced several of their recordings, and owns Chromatics’ longtime record label, Italians Do It Better, is notably not mentioned in the announcement. In a statement to Stereogum, a representative for Jewel said, “Johnny is extremely proud of his work with the project over the years and he’ll continue making music and supporting great art and artists through his label Italians Do It Better.”
Chromatics formed in Portland, Oregon in 2001, releasing their debut album Chrome Rats vs Basement Rutz in 2003. Their most recent album, Closer To Grey, came out in 2019. Though the band shared a few new singles last year, their much-anticipated record Dear Tommy, which was first announced in 2014, has yet to be released.
