Romy has shared the latest single from her debut solo album, Mid Air. Following ‘Strong’, ‘Enjoy Your Life’, and ‘Loveher’, the new song, ‘The Sea’, was produced by Fred again.. and Stuart Price. It arrives with a music video directed by Mollie Mills and featuring Romy and her wife, the director and photographer Vic Lentaigne. Check it out below.
“Romy always evokes this feeling of euphoria — and with this track specifically touching on wrestles of romance — through a queer lens, it intuitively evoked something about this kind of intertwinement of bodies, both in intimacy and in club culture,” Mills explained in a statement. “I had loosely referenced Louise Bourgeois’ sculpture ‘The Couple’ which actualizes that soul-rupturing entanglement of falling in love — and this is what we wanted to feel in these seascape scenes. This light, blissful, euphoric togetherness that happens alongside these memory slices of euro-heaven. There’s a power that can live in the simplicity of these domestic moments between two queer bodies too — when I think back to the loves of summers past, the memories I have are always the small details, a billowing curtain or a lovers hair after they shower.”
Lydia Loveless has released a new track, ‘Runway’, lifted from the Ohio singer-songwriter’s upcoming album Nothing’s Gonna Stand in My Way Again. It follows lead cut ‘Toothache’, and you can listen to it below.
“This was one of the very first songs I wrote for this record,” Loveless said in a statement. “I hated it, but my friend Amy was giving me assignments and pushing me to write my way through heartache while I was crashing on her couch. She would send me out with a notebook and tell me not to come back until I had something.”
“Eventually, this one grew on me and is now actually my favorite to sing on the whole record,” she continued. “It’s deeply personal and gut-wrenching to perform. It’s about not wanting my relationship to end but knowing things weren’t ever going to improve. I’m especially proud of the instrumentation, particularly the guitar part at the end that had everyone calling me Mark Knopfler when I came out of the booth.”
Nothing’s Gonna Stand in My Way Again arrives September 22 via Bloodshot.
On the surface, The Ballad of Darren sounds a little too comfortable for its own good. It whirls by casually in just 36 minutes, containing some of Blur’s most straightforward songs to date. Damon Albarn’s melodies are lush and uniformly mellow, James Ford’s production is polished but not overwrought, the band’s chemistry tight enough to elevate the whole thing. Albarn has called it “the first legit Blur album” since 1999’s 13; their last reunion LP, The Magic Whip, emerged from impromptu sessions while the band was stuck in Singapore after a tour date was cancelled, with Graham Coxon and producer Stephen Street pushing the album to completion over the next couple of years. The Ballad of Darren, meanwhile, came together swiftly and unexpectedly when Blur were offered to play a pair of huge shows at Wembley Stadium; Albarn presented a batch of songs he believed would fit on a new Blur album, and soon all four members gathered in the studio to build them out. In fact, the opening track originated as a demo Albarn first cut all the way back in 2003, and the album takes its name from the band’s longtime security guard, Darren “Smoggy” Evans, who urged him to finish it.
Given the musicians’ various other ventures, there’s something magical and necessary about their ability to recapture the essence of the band in such spontaneous fashion; it’s hard to imagine it happening any other way without crumbling under its own weight. There are tracks that manage to conjure and condense the band’s aesthetic in an instantly familiar yet contained manner, while others reference back to the band’s history without allowing themselves to get too reflexive – lead single ‘The Narcissist’ excels at both. Though the success of that and the other pre-release single, ‘St. Charles Square’, may be tied to the excitement of a comeback, it’s not really the story that binds The Ballad of Darren – but it’s only because they’ve effectively worked through it that the album’s less-than-triumphant qualities shine through. Whatever flickers of nostalgia fans might cling onto here, the feeling of warm melancholy that glides over the record feels strikingly personal and anchored in the present, even as past traumas loom over.
“Well, I know I can’t change the timеs/ I know I’m already breaking when I look into your eyes,” Albarn sings on ‘The Ballad’, a lovely opener that risks sounding a little too much like a solo cut. But as the album progresses, the band finds ways to wrestle with the helplessness and inertia of moving through a breakup – generally the main subject of these songs – that aren’t just gracefully mirroring the dull pain it leaves behind. Rather than feeling contradictory, the shimmering guitar and gently ambling groove on highlight ‘Barbaric’ suggest a shade of sincerity that can only come with time, situating the ultimate confession – “I have lost the feeling that I thought I’d never lose” – away from the immediate aftermath of heartbreak and towards acceptance, or a yearning for it. The album’s elegant presentation gets just the right amount of twisted on ‘Goodbye Albert’, whose gnarly guitar and vocoder vocals swell with a different kind of desperation (“I stayed away/ I gave you time/ Why don’t you talk to me anymore?/ Don’t punish me forever”), while ‘Avalon weaves in orchestral arrangements to gorgeous effect.
But any tension that’s built into The Ballad of Darren sounds deliberately measured, especially as it oscillates between vague hope and middle-age resignation. On ‘The Everglades (For Leonard)’, the line between wispy sentiments and the kind that resonate on a more universal level feels a little too thin. But Blur manage to break the barrier on songs like ‘Russian Strings’ and ‘The Narcissist’, the latter of which fights back against the ego-driven, cynical voices in Albarn’s head by placing everyone who might identify with them on the same stage, subjects to the same ambiguous threat: “I’ll be shining light in your eyes/ You’ll probably shine it back on me.” We get to hear a glimpse of what it sounds like on closer ‘The Heights’, which finds Albarn “Seeing through the coma in our lives/ Something so bright out there you can’t even see it,” before getting swallowed up in a wave of distortion. Their new album shows a band no longer flirting with chaos but eager to find ways to tame it, but staring back in that final moment of destruction, self-inflicted or not, they lean fully into it. That ending you can’t control.
Former Cure drummer Lol Tolhurst, ex-Siouxsie and the Banshees drummer Budgie, and producer Garret ‘Jacknife’ Lee have enlisted LCD Soundsytem’s James Murphy for their debut single, ‘Los Angeles’. It’s the title track from the trio’s forthcoming album, which is set to arrive November 3 via Play It Again Sam. It features guest appearances from Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie, U2’s The Edge, Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock, Lonnie Holley, Mary Lattimore, Starcrawler’s Arrow de Wilde, and IDLES’ Mark Bowen. Listen to ‘Los Angeles’ and find the album artwork and tracklist below.
Los Angeles started coming together after Budgie met Tolhurst for lunch while Budgie was passing through Los Angeles as part of John Grant’s touring band. “As we were finishing, Lol turns to me and says, ‘I think we should do something together’,” Budgie recalled. “With these things, I usually go away and forget, but for once in my life I said to myself, ‘Yeah good idea!’”
The pair eventually recorded the album over two weeks with Lee in Topanga. “Lol is very levelling,” Budgie said. “He calls himself a pragmatist, whereas I’m very impetuous, and it was like Garret was bridging the two, in his consultation room.”
Tolhurst added: “Adding some vocalists that we like was obviously going to make it more attractive to people, so over the space of about 18 months to two years, we got a whole bunch of them in, and as far as lyrics went, we just said, ‘You make something up!'”
Los Angeles Cover Artwork:
Los Angeles Tracklist:
1. This Is What It Is (To Be Free) [with Bobby Gillespie]
2. Los Angeles [with James Murphy]
3. Uh Oh [with Arrow de Wilde and Mark Bowen (IDLES)]
4. Ghosted At Home [with Bobby Gillespie]
5. Train With No Station [with The Edge]
6. Bodies [with Lonnie Holley and Mary Lattimore]
7. Everything And Nothing
8. Travel Channel [with Pam Amsterdam]
9. Country of the Blind [with Bobby Gillespie]
10. The Past (Being Eaten)
11. We Got To Move [with Isaac Brock]
12. Noche Oscura [with The Edge]
13. Skins [with James Murphy]
Throughout the week, we update our Best New Songs playlist with the new releases that caught our attention the most, be it a single leading up to the release of an album or a newly unveiled deep cut. And each Monday, we round up the best new songs released over the past week (the eligibility period begins on Monday and ends Sunday night) in this best new music segment.
On this week’s list, we have Big Thief’s swirling, breathtaking new single ‘Vampire Empiree’, which has been a staple of the band’s live sets for years; ‘Wide Awake’, a hazy, affecting single off Strange Ranger’s new LP; Angel Du$t’s pummeling new single ‘Space Jam’; ‘Do Your Worst’, which folds influences from club music into Vagabon’s indie rock sound; MJ Lenderman’s crunchy, radiant first song for -ANTI, ‘Rudolph’; ‘Full Time Job’, a raucous, cathartic track from Squirrel Flower’s upcoming album; Mali Velasquez’s poignant, beautiful new single ‘Tore’; ‘I Wanted to Be’, a tenderly heartbreaking highlight from Allegra Krieger’s new record; and Explosions in the Sky’s grand, propulsive ‘Ten Billion People’, which leads their latest LP End.
Mitski has announced a new album titled The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We. “Hi, this is Mitski, and I’m at Bomb Shelter Studios in Nashville, where we recorded my new album that’s coming out,” Mitski said in a voice memo included in her official newsletter. “It’s called The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, and its first single is coming out on Wednesday.” Check out the clip below.
The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We will mark Mitski’s seventh album, following Laurel Hell, which came out in February 2022. No further information about the new LP is known at this time.
Andrey Kazantsev is a contemporary sculptor whose creations have appeared in numerous art collections worldwide. Represented by Katerina Morgan Horse Polo Art Gallery, Kazantsev works with various metals, including steel and iron, uniting strict geometry with impeccable flat-faced architecture that brings out a distinctive charm. To talk about his work, Andrey joined us for an interview.
Hi, how are you and how is the art world treating you?
Hello, I’m great, thank you. Actually, I consider myself to be both a technical expert and an artist. I try to go beyond just engineering and creating familiar objects in unusual geometric shapes with unique character and personal style.
Your work is characterized by the transformation of flat, cold sheets of metal into three-dimensional, “animated” animals. Can you describe your process and how you imbue these sculptures with unique personalities?
This is how the procedure appears: On the computer, I start by making a 3D design. I’m not really sure how my sculpture will turn out at this point. I just begin moving points about in space and drawing new boundaries and lines. In order to create a pleasing blend of geometric forms, I spin the model and examine it from various angles. These are often big faces that are triangular, quadrilateral, or pentagonal in shape. What I’m attempting to make or observe is difficult for me to define precisely. It’s just that at a certain point I realize that this is it.
After that, I export this model to another application and divide it into components. I consider where the welding will happen, how the assembly will go, and where it is best to bend the metal. In order to have access to all interior corners during assembly, I carefully consider the sequence in which the body components will be welded. I utilize metal sheets ranging in thickness from 1.5 to 3mm, depending on the size of the sculpture. The program takes all of this into consideration to ensure that the components fit together precisely after being laser-cut.
I obtain the laser cutting files as a consequence, and then send them for cutting. A CNC sheet metal bender is used to bend the cut pieces. Then we go on to assembly and welding. After welding, all the seams are ground so that no one could not understand where the joint and where the bend. This is the most painstaking part of the work. The final stage is surface sanding, polishing or painting. I like to experiment with different metals and processings. In addition to regular steel and stainless steel, we work with brass, Corten steel and even titanium.
Each of your sculptures is unique and has a distinct ID found in a model certificate. Can you explain the significance of this ID and how it contributes to the uniqueness of each piece?
Over the past years, both my laboratory and my artwork have experienced tremendous growth. I made a special 3-D model with my own distinctive design, and now I’m working on steel sculptures with the assistance of several artists. Each order demands a lot of work, and we always complete each sculpture with meticulous attention to every little thing.
In my studio, skilled artisans create each sculpture from start to finish. Each sculpture has a unique number that allows me to track the welders and grinders who worked on and the time. A series number is also added to the sculpture if it is intended that it will be manufactured as a limited edition. In addition to the number, each sculpture is stamped with my signature, which means that I personally inspected the sculpture.
Your works blend well with contemporary architecture and outdoor landscapes. How do you consider the environment in which your sculptures will be placed when creating them?
My primary thought when creating a sculpture is not only about the landscape where it’s going to be placed; instead, I mostly concentrate on my feelings of liking or disliking what I see on the computer screen.
Your sculptures are noted for their strict geometry, faultless flat-faced architecture, and simplicity. How do you balance these elements with the need to capture the harmony and beauty of animals?
I might add that I am not trying to exactly replicate and make an exact copy of the object. I try to convey the image with a minimum number of facets. To achieve recognizability by adding small details is too easy. But it’s tricky because too abstract artwork will not be perceived well. So I have to find a balance.
If you could give any advice to any aspiring artists, what would it be?
My biggest piece of advise is to get started doing what you enjoy and to involve others in the process. Don’t think about it, though, and don’t worry about what people will say. The most crucial thing is to have pleasure in the process. It is essential to comprehend what it is that makes you so happy. Something for which you are ready to give up everything and do only this. It’s experimenting for me. When I get an idea, I am prepared to focus solely on it, forgoing food and sleep and losing track of everything else.
With the hype surrounding Oppenheimer capturing the attention of cinema enthusiasts everywhere, the watch community has also been buzzing, particularly regarding the film’s showcase of Hamilton watches. Hamilton boasts an illustrious cinematic history, first gracing the silver screen in Marlene Dietrich’s 1932 film Shanghai Express. Over the years, Hamilton has maintained a robust partnership with Hollywood, appearing in iconic films like Men in Black, James Bond: Live and Let Die, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, among others.
It’s also worth noting that Hamilton’s collaboration with Nolan isn’t a recent development. Previous films from Nolan, such as Tenet and Interstellar, have prominently featured Hamilton watches. So, before we bore you, let’s delve into the standout watches in Oppenheimer.
Hamilton Cushion B (1930s)
Designed with a distinctive cushion shape, the Hamilton Cushion B is a testament to the brand’s legacy of producing uniquely-crafted timepieces since its inception in 1892. The watch highlighted in the film appears to be a 14k gold, complemented by a leather strap—a design Hamilton originally marketed as the ideal companion for the travelling man. The watch boasts a luminous dial powered by a 981 movement, later updated to the 987 movement around 1926.
In the movie worn by J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Lexington (1940s)
Another timepiece Oppenheimer wears is the Lexington, an Art-deco-like piece with a rounded bezel and a beautiful black dial held together by a grey leather strap.
Endicott (1940s)
The last of the pieces worn by Oppenheimer is the Endicott which was introduced by Hamilton in 1938 and concluded in 1948. In the movie, the watch features a gold case with gold numerals, bringing out a winning combination. It is also adorned with an exquisite brown leather strap.
Others
Before we finalise the list, quite a few other Hamilton watches are worn in the film. As an example, Kitty Oppenheimer wears a stunning Lady Hamilton, a piece you can still purchase today and which was also featured in Nightmare Alley (worn by Mara Rooney). Lieutenant General Leslie Groves also wears Hamilton in the movie, most prominently the Military Ordonance, a military watch that would fit any modern watch collection, even by today’s standards. Alongside that, Groves wears a Piping Rock (1920s) dress watch that emulates class.
Doss has unveiled a new one-off single, ‘Drugs’. The track has been a longstanding staple of the New York-based producer’s DJ sets, and it’s now got an official release. Check it out below.
‘Drugs’ flips the 2018 Uffie track of the same name. “‘Drugs’ plays with the relationships between extremes; joy and shame, indulgence and affliction, boredom and euphoria,” Doss said in a statement. “Friends who have left but whose memories live on. Driving around, nothing to do—getting into trouble or good ol’ fun?”
Earlier this month, Doss shared her remix of Caroline Polachek’s ‘Bunny Is a Rider’.
Strange Ranger started out as the duo of guitarist Isaac Eiger and bassist Fred Nixon, who released their full-length debut as Sioux Falls, Rot Forever, in 2016 before changing their name to Strange Ranger at the end of that year. Now split between New York and Philadelphia, the group has expanded into a quartet featuring bassist Fred Nixon, singer Fiona Woodman, and drummer Nathan Tucker. Though they have always pushed their sound in different directions, their fourth record, Pure Music, out today, is their most adventurous and larger-than-life to date. Infusing the timeless familiarity of shoegaze with influences from house, disco, and trp-hop, the LP builds on the promise of their 2021 mixtape No Light in Heaven, smoothing out its rougher edges and presenting an abstract stream of ideas in a more cohesive, concentrated form.
Although songs like the opener, ‘Rain So Hard’, hint at the dissolution of Eiger and Woodman’s five-year romantic relationship, the recording process behind the album, which took place in a cabin in upstate New York during a blizzard, felt like their most collaborative to date. The results are both disorienting and enrapturing, melancholy yet decadent, slipping into a space that feels simultaneously out of reach and achingly present. The vocal effects, samples, and odd textures that permeate the album don’t clutter but enhance its cinematic qualities and the interplay between the band’s voices, evoking fragmented memories that distort and wrap themselves around each other. “The rhythm of the club might lead me somewhere,” Eiger sings, but you can’t quite place it, a longing for a time you’ve never really experienced and can’t be sure has even existed. As the album continues its search for transcendence, though, the feeling that seeps through in those rare breakdowns – blurry as it still may be – is euphoric, shared, and totally real.
We caught up with Strange Ranger for the latest edition of our Artist Spotlight series to talk about their memories of recording Pure Music, their collaborative relationship, the idea behind the title, and more.
Pure Music emerged from the same sessions as No Light in Heaven, which stitched together some of the different styles that also find home on the new album. How do you see the relationship between those two projects?
Nathan Tucker: I guess you could say No Light in Heaven was like the B-sides, but we just released them first.
Fred Nixon: Yeah, sort of a reverse B-sides situation. In a way, making the mixtape was us figuring out how to make the album afterwards, entering into that new territory and then honing it a bit more. And then we put together the songs that that felt like a unit for the record, whereas the mix tape is totally scatterbrain.
Was there any overlap between the songs, or was there a clear trajectory from one project to the next?
NT: We pretty much had all the songs at the same time. We pretty intentionally wanted to make one thing that was really all over the place and one thing that felt way more cohesive. Definitely the stuff on Pure Music changed a lot as we are making it.
Isaac Eiger: The initial sessions occurred at the same time. We had somewhere between demos and actual songs for everything, and then we really made No Light in Heaven, and then we really made Pure Music. We wanted the mixtape to feel really chaotic, like you were sort of being pulled in all these different directions. And there was still this throughline, but the throughline was imposed on you as a listener, like, “None of this shit makes sense, but we’re gonna force it to make sense for you.” But the new one, we didn’t want it to be less crazy or interesting or whatever, but we wanted it to feel like it was one piece of music, you’re listening to it and it all goes together.
What originally inspired you to go in this experimental direction?
IE: I think we’d just gotten really bored of what we had done. We were listening to weird music, and we’ve always just made stuff that we want to listen to.
FN: It’s funny, people talk about the mixtape being a departure from our previous sound – I understand why it’s more striking because there’s more electronic elements and stuff like that, but I feel like every time we make a record, we want it to be different from the last thing. To me, the first three records we made all feel different from each other.
NT: And we’re just way better at doing things than we used to be, so those differences are going to be more stark.
With this departure, was it more of a challenge to familiarize yourselves with new production techniques, or to integrate them into your sound?
IE: We just got really into making music like that. We got really into dance music and ambient music, so that’s what we were making. It would have been a challenge to make a record where we werent’ doing those things. That would have been really boring and horrible.
NT: If what you’re asking about is the difference between learning how to do something and then actually applying it, I think the enthusiasm for the cool shit we were trying out – sometimes we would definitely take it too far. I remember there’s a version of ‘It’s You’, the last song on the mixtape, where there’s this insane, really bad UK garage bridge that sort of sounds like nightcore or something. [laughs] We were all psyched on it for like 20 minutes and then we’re like, “Oh, this is really not good.”
IE: The problem is if you push it too far, it’s like hyperpop, which we’re not into at all. There has to be some kind of aesthetic boundary in what you’re doing so it doesn’t just feel totally mindless.
NT: Often Fiona is the one to be like, “Yo guys, what we’re playing is not…” [inaudible due to laughter]
Fiona Woodman: My duty, gotta keep my boys in check.
IA: There’s definitely shit on the stuff we made where I’m like, “Fuck, we shouldn’t have done that.” But it’s like, you know what, it got mastered, it’s on vinyl, so…
FN: I mean, everything that you make you look back on and would do differently at different points in time.
You recorded the album at a cabin in upstate New York with a blizzard raging outside. Was that where the initial sessions took place? What are your memories of that time?
IE: That’s where most of the early sessions took place. It was just really crazy and intense. We were staying up super late. I felt pretty psycho a lot of time.
FW: I feel like most of the actual progress on the record was between 10:00 and 4:00am. We were literally snowed in.
IE: We read in some Talk Talk interview about how when they made Spirit of Eden and and Laughing Stock, they would record for a really long time, like, some guy playing flute or something, and then they would take a five second clip of it and fade that into the track and fade it out. So we were doing that with the computer and a bunch of other weird shit. We were just having tons and tons of ideas and throwing most things out.
FW: I wasn’t like super involved in the records previously, but it was definitely a very different way of making music. Isaac and Fred would bring outlines or bones of the song, and then we would all riff on ideas. Definitely the more dance sections of the songs were really fun, just really jacked on caffeine at two in the morning. [laughs]
FN: It was a very immersive experience. I was making a drink that I was calling psycho sludge, which was just coffee spiked with brandy, staying up all night and throwing ideas at the wall.
NT:It was really thick French press coffee, but made with pre-ground coffee that was too thin for French press, so it was kind of seeping through the press and leaving this centimeter-thick layer of sludge at the bottom of the cup.
IE: Fred was feeding us undercooked chicken.
FW: And I was filming the entire thing. I have hours and hours of everyone – what is that Mortal Kombat song?
IE: Oh yeah, I fucking love that song. Just the theme song from Mortal Kombat.
FW: Everybody’s got their mug full of disgusting brandy-spiked coffeegoing nuts to that one.
FN: In certain ways, I remember it as almost annoying, being totally immersed in that studio and living environment being all the same thing. Because you’d be like, “It’s 4:00 am, I’m going to bed now.” And then somebody would have a breakthrough or something.
FW: That was usually me. I was like, “I can’t do it, I’m falling asleep.” And then I would wake up at like three in the morning, walk out of the room to you guys just looking insane – like your eyes are bloodshot, you look back at me and you’re like, “Fiona, we made a breakthrough!” And then I listen to it and I’m like, “This is not gonna work. This is true insanity. What the fuck have you done?” And then the next morning we’d come back to it and be like, “We need to dial it back a little bit.”
IE: I wish I could hear a version of the record with all the horrible ideas still there. [all laugh]
Strange Ranger’s Version?
IE: Yeah, literally.
FW: The Strange Ranger mix. Psycho Sludge Mix.
FN: I remember one specific example of that. It was a mixtape song, not an album song, but that scenario where Fiona woke up and went to go to the bathroom or something and comes out and we’re like, “Fiona! We’re out here double-chorusing the end of ‘It’s You’!” It’s like the meme with Charlie from Always Sunny in the mail room. And then the next day it was a single chorus.
FW: I remember that also with the end of ‘Blue Shade’, the hardcore dance section. I was like, “I don’t think this is gonna work, you guys.”
FN: Fiona said it was sounded like Muse, and then we had to change it. We were in denial about it at first, but you were right.
IE: That really hurt my feelings, but it was totally the right decision. [all laugh] I feel like that song was, “It’s like Muse, it’s like Muse, it’s like Muse,” and then when we were finishing the record upstate, I remember being like, “Fuck it,” and then we chipped a ton of things out and it’s like, “Now it works.”
NT: I think that’s sort of illustrative of the weird vibe of making it, because not only did the whole thing spring out of these formless late night session, but you’re painting with such a broad brush a lot of the time, making music on a computer, that there’s going to be all these really dramatic decisions being made. And then other people in the band are just gonna be like, “No, that actually kind of sucks,” and no one can really get their feelings hurt about it because you’re just trying to do something that is so unlike anything you’ve tried to do before. It didn’t really feel a way I had made music with other people before, ever. It felt totally unconnected to anything else that was going on in my life at the time in a really nice way.
Isaac, you mentioned this Talk Talk interview, and in a press release you also cite a quote by Burial. How does reading about other people’s approach to music inspire you collectively?
IE: The way that musicians and artists we like make their work is definitely inspiring, especially if you’re experimenting with different ideas. It’s like a torch far away and it’s all dark, and you read this interview with somebody and you’re like, “Oh, I know what to do now.” Also, hearing about people’s headspaces when they made things that we really care about, it just tells you a lot about how to do the things you want to do, why this person did this, and how you can do your own thing.
I wanted to talk about the term “pure music,” which comes up on ‘She’s on Fire’ and gives the album its title. To you, is it tied to escapism? Is it something you’re after?
IE: It’s both wanting escape and the exact opposite. It’ wanting to make the present moment feel infinitely more intense than it feels, or infinitely more calm, or whatever. You’re where you are, and it feels lacking in a way that you can’t describe, so you want it to feel another way. It’s not escapism in the way that you watch a TV show to get out of your horrible life. It’s escapism in the way that having your favorite song come on just annihilates your entire sense of time for a few minutes. It’s wanting to break through to something more, but it isn’t actually anything else than what’s happening right now.
Do you feel like you’ve all had different emotional experiences and visions of the album throughout the process?
NT: Making music collaboratively can be in a weird way lonelier than not, because what the record means to Isaac, what the record means to Fred, is different on some level than what it means to me. Those experiences aren’t the same thing. I think about this with the last song on the record, ‘Dazed in the Shallows’, where I have this iPhone video from those early sessions of us all dancing around like maniacs to that song right when we figured out what it was. Now, when I listen to that song, it has all these all these emotional connections and undertones for me. And I’m sure it has all these things for everyone else, but those things are different. There’s kind of an inherent loneliness about that, just knowing that the way something feels for me is not going to be exactly the same as it feels for everyone else. But at the same time, that, I think for all of us, is one of the more euphoric songs to play in the set, and something we all feel really proud of making. That moment of us all dancing, it was really the opposite of loneliness. It’s like both of those things at the same time. Which I think art always is, right? Most of my favorite art is about that ontological problem of just: How do I connect with other people in a way that is meaningful when I can never really know what’s inside them?
FW: And that feeling of hearing that one part of that one song, when the chorus hits for the first time, and you literally get goosebumps everywhere – chasing that fleeting feeling always.
NT: Where you’re like, “I fucking love my life, and I love these people I’m with.” And you know, I don’t always feel that way.
Can you each share something that you love about the rest of the group?
FN: Something that comes to mind that I’ll offer that applies to the group, which I feel like is a very us thing, is our ability to endlessly engage in painfully pedantic arguments about food. [all laugh] We all have extremely strong opinions about the silliest things, and I feel like we get used to arguing about, like, what the best fry sauce is.
FW: Spirited discussions.
FN: Yeah. It’s funny, because I feel like I’ll take that dynamic outside of the band, and someone’s like, “Why are you arguing with me about ranch dressing?”
FW: I literally spend more time with you three than my family, even. We spend so much time together on tour and making music together, so you end up having a lot of really weird discussions about what Skittles flavor is the best or something silly.
NT: Not even in the context ofyour original question, because it sounds like I’m just like scraping the bottom of the barrel for things I like about these people I spend all the time with, which is not true, but I’m often struck by how compatible our ways we like to spend time are. Obviously, when you’re in the van with someone every waking moment for a month or whatever, it ceases to feel that way a little bit after a while. But then I’ll just hang out with other bands, or just other groups of people that do stuff together, and I’m like, “Damn, it’s pretty easy with us.” [laughs]
IE: Seeing other bands is really interesting. People do things so differently, and we’re just so used to how we do things. But it’s always weird. It’s like seeing another family.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Hamilton Cushion B (1930s)
Endicott (1940s)
