Tag: psych pop

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: POND Shares Weary and Resilient “(I’m) Stung”

Founded back in 2008, acclaimed Perth-based JOVM mainstays POND — currently, songwriter and producer Jay Watson (vocals, guitar, keys, drums, synths and bass), who’s also the creative mastermind of acclaimed JOVM mainstay outfit GUM and a touring member of acclaimed, Grammy Award-nominated JOVM mainstays Tame Impala; Nicholas Allbook (lead vocals, guitar, keys, bass, flute, slide guitar and drums; Joe Ryan (vocals, guitar, bass, 12 string guitar, slide guitar); Jamie Terry (keys, bass, synths, organs, guitar); and Jamie Ireland (drums, keys) — have released nine critically applauded albums that have seen the band’s sound gradually morph into increasingly synth-driven psych pop.

The Perth-based outfit’s last four albums have been showcases of tidiness and brevity: 10 songs/ideas tucked into 40 minutes or so. Slated for a June 21, 2024 release through Spinning Top Music, the acclaimed JOVM mainstays’ 10th album Stung! sees the band gleefully, madly and willfully lean into the largesse of the double LP, tapping into the spirit of albums like Tusk and Sign ‘O’ the Times with a 14-song effort that may arguably be the most unfettered hour of their career.

Being a band for the better part of two decades, the members of Pond have accepted — with no small joy or relief — that they are no longer beholden to shifting expectations of cool. That idea has greatly empowered them, allowing them to play precisely what they want, to not move toward any goal but being themselves.

Granted, it takes a lot more effort to the band to make a record these days: They’re all adults with relationships, children, professional obligations, hobbies, side-projects and/or some mix of them all. In fact, last year, Allbrook released a solo album and Watson released a fantastic GUM album — and both members went on fairly extensive tours to support those efforts.

The band began making Stung! in piecemeal fashion with a member or two showing up at Watson’s little backyard studio to work on a new idea. They’d thinker joyously and endlessly in Watson’s little workshop, trying out a panoply of machines and widgets to get interesting sounds. This allowed them to let the songs they were working on to sit over time, so that their deeply democratic process could not only siphon and improve the best ones, but also tease out what the album was missing.

Of course, at some time the band realized that they were running the risk of being stuck in that phase — creation, adjustment, addition — forever. So, the quintet went to Dunsborough, a scenic surfing hub on Australia’s southwestern coast, where a friend had recently finished a spacious, state-of-the-art studio. While in Dunsborough, Allbrook would run near the shore every morning. They’d all swim during the day, then record deep in the night. Most of their ancillary gear was left at home, forcing them to drill down on the songs, ideas and sounds they already had, and to make them better without getting overly carried away in endless possibility. After nearly a year of writing and workshopping, the JOVM mainstays had plenty of material for what would be the most expansive album of their career to date.

The album’s title began as an in joke for the band, a reference to having a crush on someone or something that they began to use so often that they felt they just had to call the album that. They still laugh when they hear it now, a silly inside wisecrack suddenly open to the outside world. But for the band, it’s kind of a credo too: Despite the bruises, the callousness and suffering of both every day life and the music industry, they remain stung with music, with the idea of making songs that feel just so and doing it together, as friends. And that they’re still stung with the world, too, even when it bites back.

Stung!‘s second and latest single, “(I’m) Stung” is a defiantly upbeat, big hearted and wearily resilient song anchored around strummed overdriven acoustic guitar, buzzing power chords, big shout along worthy hooks and choruses and a laid-back trippy groove serving as a supple and dreamily bed for Allbrook’s heartbroken yet proud delivery, expressing a bitterly uneasy acceptance.

“I wrote most of this while mowing someone’s lawn. I went home and put my fingers on the piano and pretty much played the base of it first go,” Pond’s Nicholas Allbrook says. “This is a very rare and special treat and buoyed me for weeks. It’s funny because I had a mad crush on someone, and they dropped me like a sack of shit and this song just flew down and clocked me right in the forehead and I felt totally better. Then Gin and Gum added all their magic – cool sounds, passing chords.

It’s about being totally pathetically stung by someone and just having to be cool with it being unrequited. Being resilient, accepting that you are a bit of a goose, but life goes on.”

Filmed by Pond and Chris Adams, edited by Jamie Terry and color graded by Tom Dunphy is shot on a Super 8 and follows the members of the band on a sand bank: Allbrook is shirtless and in silver body paint from face down to his waist. The rest of the band — Watson, Ryan, Terry and Ireland — are in silver lame outfits. A bee kite flies just above them. And throughout, Allbrook vamps like a mad Mick Jagger. Allbrook and The rest of the band walks the top of the embankment or slides down it, goofing off and in many ways attempting to not get stung — unsuccessfully.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: MAGON Shares Hauntingly Gorgeous “The Writing’s On The Wall”

Over the past handful of years, I’ve spilled a copious amount of virtual ink covering the remarkably prolific, Israeli-born singer/songwriter, musician and of course, JOVM mainstay MAGON. If you’ve been frequenting this site in that period of time, you’d remember that after the release of his fifth album, 2022’s A Night in Bethlehem, the Israeli-born artist, along with his partner and children relocated to Costa Rica, where he continued his reputation for being profile, with three more albums, 2022’s Enter By The Narrow Gate and last year’s Did You Hear the Kids? and Chasing Dreams.

The JOVM mainstay began the year with the announcement of his eighth album The Writing’s On The Wall, which will feature “Breakthrough Blitz,” a song that saw MAGON’s laconic and easy-going delivery paired with a simple yet propulsive backbeat, glistening keys and a blues Keith Richards-like guitar riff with a big hook. Thematically, the song touched upon the freedom and connection found in simple, everyday moments with the sort of contented sigh that can only comes from someone, who has lived a full and messy-life — and understands that he is truly very lucky. 

The Writing’s On The Wall‘s second single, album title track “The Writing’s On The Wall” is a slow-burning, Inner Journey Out-era Psychic Ills-like bit of country-tinged psych rock with a hauntingly gorgeous bit of wailing pedal steel by Cary Morin paired with MAGON’s meditative delivery. Rooted in seemingly lived-in experience, the song’s narrator describes the sensation of knowing when your time with a situation and place are over, and picking up your life and starting anew.

The accompanying video features footage of flowers and trees blooming shot on over-saturated film stock, which gives the proceedings a surreal yet dreamy air.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Psymon Spine Returns with Punchy and Groovy “Bored of Guitar”

Psymon Spine‘s third album Head Body Connector is slated for a February 23, 2024 release through Northern Spy Records. The album is reportedly a gritty, punchy, guitar-forward studio album from a band that’s long been obsessed with production. Perhaps more than their previous releases, Head Body Connector is explicitly informed and inspired by the band’s cathartic live show. “It’s more unhinged than anything we’ve made before,” Psymon Spine’s Noah Prebish says. “Throughout the writing process, we were always asking ourselves how we could make it really fun to play live.”  

Ironically, the album, though ready-made to be performed, was mostly written in 2020 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The band split their time between various home studios and friends’ back porches in Montauk, The Catskills, Boston and Brooklyn. It was fall and the crisp autumn air, and the political uncertainty and disquietude looming in the background lended itself to an undeniable longing for companionship. “It felt like we had collectively jumped from one timeline to another, more bizarre one,” Prebish says. 

The central theme of time being fractured, chopped and screwed is integral to the album’s material and its album art, which was designed by New York-based artist Bucky Boudreau and appears in the form of alternative measurements of passing seconds, minutes, days, lifetimes, tally marks on a chalkboard and infinity signs made of camp bracelets on a cracked egg.“Head Body Connector is our response to a world even more chaotic than usual,” says Peter Spears, “and an exploration of the little joys, anxieties, and absurdities that world has to offer.” While being an ode to the dissonance of temporality in our current moment, it’s also an elastic tribute to friendship and harmony in the face of that dissonance. 

So far I’ve written about two of Head Body Connector‘s singles:

“Boys,” a track that begins with a glistening New Wave-meets-post punk introduction before quickly morphing into a funky, synth-driven both with slashing guitars. The two seemingly disparate sections are held together with Sabine Holler’s dreamy delivery. But just under the infectious, danceable surface, is an introspective song that reveals a subtle sense of unease. 

“Wizard Acid,” a woozy bit of disco funk built around a punchy bass line, glistening synth arpeggios and thumping beats paired with lyrics about coming apart at the seams — both literally and metaphorically. Consumed with cabin fever, the song’s narrator is slowly losing their mind. 

Head Body Connector‘s third and latest single, the punchy and hook-driven “Bored of Guitar” is a mischievous tongue-in-cheek provocation built around guitar that sounds indebted to Gang of Four, Talking Heads, DEVO and others but full of scathing, self-deprecating, self-aware, self-criticism that’s seemingly informed by getting older, seeing your priorities shift and change — and perhaps hating it as much as you’re accepting it.

“‘Bored of Guitar’ was one of the earlier tracks we worked on for Head Body Connector. Like many of our songs, it started as two separate ideas that Peter, Michael, and I (Noah) smashed into one and then expanded upon,” the Brooklyn-based JOVM mainstays explain. “The lyrics came to me piecemeal inspired by conversations I had been having with Michael about the kind of guitar-centric dude rock bands we were getting tired of seeing. The underlying fear for me, of course, was that we were one of those bands. Nothing disgusts a person like seeing in others what bothers them about themselves. The song is an amped-up meditation on (amongst other things) self-criticism, priorities shifting around, and the hilarious, painful, beautiful, humiliating, exhilarating experience of being in a band. It’s also about me working on my relationship with my younger self, the one who set most of my current life experiences into motion long ago. I love him and we’ve both got notes for each other.”   

Directed by Max Mainwood, the accompanying video for “Bored of Guitar” is a surreal, seemingly horror movie-inspired visual that features an adult and their younger self interacting with other, while being chased and haunted by menacing presences dressed in black and more. “I wanted to represent this song with a visual narrative that came from the band’s storytelling, but also pull from my personal interpretation of the song,” Mainwood explains. “This video plays as an energetic backdrop to a groovy tune, as well as an underlying story left for the audience to discover.”   

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: jjuujjuu Teams Up with Boogarins on Hazy “SOME”

Phil Pirrone is a Los Angeles-based musician and co-founder of Desert Daze. Back in 2011, after spending the previous decade of his life as a touring bassist, Pirrone borrowed and SG and DL4 and began his exploration of writing and recording looped-based music with jjuujjuu.

Pirrone’s jjuujjuu debut, 2013’s FRST EP and the follow-up, one-ff single “Bleck” helped to build up some early buzz around the project. In the project’s earliest days, the lineup and instrumentation moved in step with Pirrone’s ethos of ephemera and flux — with the project touring in several different configurations with Pirrone at the center.

Building upon a growing profile, Pirrone and company shared stages with a number of nationally and internationally known acts, including The Claypool Lennon Delirium, Tortoise, Allah-Lahs, Temples, Tinariwen and a list of others.

Pirrone spent the next few years recording material in various spaces around California. Those sessions included collaborations with Vinyl Williams, members of Lumerians, Dahga Bloom and others. The material from those sessions eventually comprised Pirrone’s jjuujuu full-length debut, 2018’s Zionic Mud. The album was accompanied by alternate versions of its tracks remixed or reimagined by many of the band’s most notable fans and supporters, including J. Mascis, Warpaint‘s jennylee, Liars, METZ, and Autolux. JJUUJJUU supported the album by opening for Primus, Mastodon, Kikagaku Moyo, and Earhtless, as well as festival sets at Pickathon, Nelsonville, M3F and others. 

During the height of the pandemic, Pirrone taught himself how to produce and record material and sent tracks to longtime bandmembers and collaborators Ian Gibbs and Joseph Assef. Those tracks were sent to a collection of talented friends that included METZ’s Alex Edkins and JOVM mainstays Boogarins and a lengthy list of others.

Now, if you were frequenting this site over the course of 2023, you might remember that I wrote about

  • “Nowhere,” a track built around a relentless motorik pulse, rolling drum beats, bursts of feedback and distortion paired with wailing vocals buried in the mix that recalls Connect the Dots-era To and Deleters-era Holy Fuck.

  • “No Way In,” a track built around propulsive, polyrhythmic percussion, a sinuous bass line and falsetto wailing drenched in reverb and delay that manages to be among the funkiest songs of Pirrone’s catalog while retaining the mind-bending and hallucinogenic quality he’s known for.

Pirrone and company start off 2024 with “SOME,” a collaboration with acclaimed Brazilian psych rock outfit and JOVM mainstays Boogarins. Built around a hypnotic motorik groove and layers of swirling and howling feedback and reverberated distortion. Boogarins added a dreamy bridge and vocals that seem that oscillating between English and their native Brazilian Portuguese, which gives the song a dreamy, psilocybin-fueled, hallucinogenic air.

Track remotely between Los Angeles and Brazil between 2020-2021, Pirrone says: “We sent the track to Boogarins, who added a really beautiful bridge to the song, and vocals oscillating between English and Portuguese. Something in this song recalls early childhood memories of Muppet Babies or Elton John ‘Benny and the Jets’… but in a really weird (but good) way. End result feels like a flower dancing on the sand under a São Paolo sun.”

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Sunglaciers Share Woozy and Aching “Cursed”

Calgary-based post-punk/psych pop outfit and JOVM mainstays Sunglaciers can trace its origins back to 2017 as a collaboration between its founding members —  multi-instrumentalist Matthieu Blanchard and lead vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Evan Resnik.

The band’s full-length debut, 2019’s Foreign Bodies saw them crafting a maximalist approach that blurred the lines between dazzling indie rock melodicism and icy post-punk experimentalism. The Calgary-based JOVM mainstays support the album with tours with the likes of fellow JOVM mainstays Preoccupations, Omni and Daniel Romano. Adding to a growing profile both regionally and nationally, their material topped the charts of college radio stations across Western Canada.

When the pandemic put their touring plans on a then-indefinite pause, the band shifted their focus to writing material, dedicating 40-plus hour weeks to music in the early months of 2020. Those writing sessions birthed the material on their sophomore album, 2022’s Chad Van Gaalen co-produced Subterranea.

Subterranea saw the JOVM mainstays eschewing the maximalist approach of their previous releases and crafting material with a decided laser focus. The end result was a frenetic, breakneck paced album of material that managed to never overstay its welcome. “The bulk of this album came together during the pandemic and the changing of gears that we had to do,” Sunglaciers’ Evan Resnik said. “I was out of work and Mathieu was working half as much as usual, so we had lots of time on our hands. We flipped a switch and started playing music everyday. It’s a good indicator of how we were writing at the time while we wrapped our heads around some new gear and saw what came out of it. Essentially, we took all of our favourite musical tendencies and put them together. We were listening to a lot of McCartney II at the time and loved how eclectic it was, which led to us mirroring that vibe.”

Regular Nature, the Calgary-based JOVM mainstays highly-anticipated third album is slated for a March 29, 2024 release through Montréal-based label Mothland. While continuing to blur the boundaries between polished melodcism and opaque experimentation, the material sees the band blurring auspicious Romanticism and unbridled dissent. Through firmly anchored in the strange and uneasy reality of our time, the album’s songs are laced with a certain optimism through well-calculated psych elements and vibrant rhythms, creating a unique strand of kaleidoscopic pop.

Continuing their ongoing collaboration with co-producer Chad Van Gaalen, Regular Nature was purposely designed to be enjoyed in many ways, from solitary headphone listening to a crowded live venue while seemingly nodding to Deerhunter, Ought, MGMT, DEVO, Talking Heads and others. The album also features a guest spot from acclaimed Zoon creative mastermind Daniel Monkman.

“We wanted to make a concise yet explosive record, continuing to find the balance between familiar and novel sounds and approaches. We have not and may never make ‘dance music,’ but we make continued efforts to bring sounds that we like from dance and electronic genres into our own, delighting in the process as much as the product,” the band explains. “We love to play and experiment, defying expectations and discovering new sounds. This record shows how these novel (to us) elements interact with the rock and roll world we comfortably inhabit.

We want to make you dance. We want to make you think. We want to make you think while you’re dancing and dance while you’re busy thinking. This is an album for the body, brain and heart. It’s compassionate, frustrated, communal and dreadful. In a world of information overload, where everything comes at you at once, Regular Nature is trying to normalize the phenomenon. This is chaotic music for a chaotic world, a three-way conversation between outer self, the subconscious and the mad world. As expressed on penultimate track ‘One Time or Another:’ ‘There’s always somebody talking.’

Regular Nature‘s first single, the woozy, dream pop-meets-psych pop-meets-post-punk-like “Cursed” features glistening and fluttering synth arpeggios, a motorik rhythm section, an Avalon-era Roxy Music-like guitar solo and hazy and yearning vocals. The achingly nostalgic song sees its narrator discussing a love passing them by with a weary and bitterly resigned sense of regret. “Oh, if I had only known what I know now,” the song’s narrator seems to say.

“‘Cursed’ is quite probably Sunglaciers’ biggest downer to date. It is a piece about shattered, unsaid expectations, and reflecting on the reality of a situation after it has passed, and all that remains is its memory,” the band explains. “It is a slow dance between regret and acceptance, a song about lost love and lost potential. It is being caught in a moment, blinded by short-term desires, only to wake up on the other side when everything has passed and it is too late to reconcile (“You wish your head could unremember this/ But memory is all there ever is”).

Directed by the band’s Evan Resnik, the accompanying video for “Cursed” is a gorgeous, hypnotic and nostalgia-fueled fever dream that makes the familiar — dusty, countryside roads, mountaintop vistas and more — seem surreal and otherworldly. And at its core is a sense of time passing by: The familiar growing smaller in the rearview, the mistakes and regrets looming larger with an unfamiliar and uncertain future in front of you.

“We spent a lot of time in the van this past year. On the tour where I captured the bulk of this footage, we drove over 15,000km in 6 weeks. There was a lot of time quietly spent looking out the window at these amazing landscapes flying by,” Sunglaciers’ Evan Resnik explains. “All I had was my phone, but I had recently upgraded to a new-ish one with a great (to me) camera. I had a lot of time on my hands to play with perspective, and loved seeing these vistas in black and white. I was intrigued by the disorientation I felt when viewing rock formations upside down, and how something could look familiar and concrete, but also alien and abstract at the same time. That’s a feeling I wanted to explore in conjunction with our song ‘Cursed,’ which deals with regret, feelings of ‘what if?,’ and the nature of dream vs imagination vs reality. By the time we got home, I had a lot of nice footage to play with. Denice provided a wonderfully easy and interesting subject through which I could tease out a narrative arc of someone wandering alone through a melange of waking, dream, and memory.”

indie rock by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: TEKE::TEKE and Mirah Tackle The Clash For The Clash Tribute Album “Hearts & Minds & Crooked Beats”

As of last September, more than 114 million people globally have been forced to flee their homes as a result of conflict persecution and human rights violations. By the end of this year, that number is expected to reach 130 million people across the globe. Benefiting the International Rescue Committee (https://www.rescue.org) and their work with refugees, The Clash compilation tribute album Hearts & Minds & Crooked Beats invites artists, bands and visual artists to create work inspired by the legendary punk band The Clash — and to celebrate their music and human rights messages.

Slated for digital and vinyl release on International Clash Day, February 7, 2024, Hearts & Minds & Crooked Beats was mastered by Ted Jensen, known for his work with The Rolling Stones, Green Day, Norah Jones, Madonna, Alice In Chains and a lengthy list of others, the album will feature contributions from The Dandy Warhols, Smokey Brights, Seán Barna, Warren Dunes‘ Julia Massey, The Gotobeds, Big League, Labasheeda, The Rust & The Fury, acclaimed Montréal-based JOVM mainstays TEKE :: TEKE and Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter Mirah. (Track listing is available below.)

Hearts & Minds & Crooked Beats Tracklist
1. The Dandy Warhols – Straight To Hell 
2. TEKE::TEKE – Bankrobber
3. Mirah – I’m Not Down
4. The Rust and The Fury – Guns of Brixton
5. Labasheeda – Deny 
6. Smokey Brights – Train In Vain (Stand By Me
7. Seán Barna – Hitsville U.K.
8. The Gotobeds – I’m So Bored with the USA
9. Julia Massey (Warren Dunes) – Rock The Casbah
10. Big League – Lost In The Supermarket
 

International Clash Day was established back in 2013 by KEXP DJ John Richards. The holiday marks a global, annual celebration of The Clash’s influential and important message and legacy. To celebrate the 11th International Clash Day, KEXP DJs Kevin Cole and Kid Hops will transition the station’s all-day International Clash Day programming on-air to the Gathering Space for International Clash Day Live, where Smokey Brights will play a live set of Clash covers and originals. Tickets and more information are available here. 

Mirah, Seán Barna and TEKE: TEKE will play a special album release show on February 2, 2024 at Brooklyn Made. Tickets and more information are available here.

Proceeds from album sales will go to the International Rescue Committee’s global fund, supporting their vital work in responding to humanitarian crises and helping impacted individuals rebuild their lives.

Today Mirah and TEKE:: TEKE shared their contributions to Hearts & Minds & Crooked Beats.

TEKE:: TEKE’s “Bankrobber” is a restrained mind-bending interpretation that’s part Spaghetti Western and partially inspired by a sound and approach that was developing in Japan during the 70s, n parallel to the UK’s punk scene with avant-garde outfits like Tokyo Kid Brothers and JA Seazer, which inspired them to sing the bulk of the song’s lyrics in Japanese. The result is something that’s familiar but somewhat alien, yet still deeply human and universal.

TEKE :: TEKE’s Maya Kuroki felt an immediate connection to “Bankrobber,” upon hearing the same words that her late father used to jokingly say “someday I’ll become a bank robber.” She wanted to represent the meaning of the lyrics as the voice of the “community” striving to counter the increasingly widening wealth gap. I envision a modern day Robin Hood, stealing from rich, greedy capitalists and giving their ill-gotten gains to the poor and needy.

The band’s Sei Nakauchi Pelletier adds, “‘Bankrobber’ was the first ever song I heard from The Clash, it was on a compilation tape a dear friend of mine had made for me in my early 20’s. The Clash went on to become one of my favorite and most-inspiring rock bands of all-time, way beyond their musical genius but also for their political stances and DIY approach.” Pelletier’s dear friend, Malcolm Baud, was enlisted to take part on the TEKE:: TEKE cover singing verses in English — a profound collaboration and full circle moment.

Brooklyn-based artist’s Mirah recruited Erica Freas and Karl Blau for a slow-burning, sultry yet deeply sweet take on “I’m Not Down” that maintains the original’s guitar-driven heart and kookiness while seemingly drawing from The Shangri-Las. “One of the best things about being asked to work on a project like this is the opportunity it gave me to play a bunch of Clash albums all at once and to pay close attention as I was listening,” the Brooklyn-based artist explains. “I wanted to pick one that felt right for my voice, with words which reflected something about me and my own experiences. Like a lot of people, I began having some run-ins with anxiety and depression during the pandemic. I wasn’t playing shows or making much music and I was spending nearly every waking hour with a tiny person who I’d given birth to 15 months before the pandemic started. ‘I’m Not Down’ was written as a sort of F you to hard times and depression, and that felt, and feels, pretty relevant.” 

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Ghost Funk Orchestra Shares Cinematic and Trippy “To The Moon!”

Ghost Funk Orchestra founder, creative mastermind, composer, arranger, producer and multi-instrumentalist Seth Applebaum has always had a latent fascination with space and space travel, Midway through writing the arrangements, which would comprise the material of the band’s fifth album, On a Trip To The Moon, Applebaum became aware that Internet Archive had made the recordings of the Apollo to Mission Control transmissions accessible in the public domain. Once he started listening to those recordings, it gave the Ghost Funk Orchestra mastermind the idea of using the recordings as a narrative binder for the music, which he was working on at the time.

The process was painstaking. The recordings were frequently filled with long silences, punctuated by surprisingly casual commentary on the cosmos. Applebaum’s commitment to the voyage managed to draw him into a sort of historical tourism, in which he studied film, photos, and music from the era. And as he did so, he was struck by the gusto with which new technology was embraced in pop culture of the day, and he honors that tradition by skillfully blending digital recording techniques to cobble together arrangements incorporating 60s and 70s analog keys and guitar sounds that bring early surf bands from the 50s and 60s. The album’s material also nods to 90s surf punk band Man or Astro-man?, who used vintage sound bites in their music, tying together cosmologically themed concept albums together with clips from vintage sci-fi and B movies. This is also informed by Applebaum’s religious listening to Little Steven’s Underground Garage radio show, which also used soundbites from films and TV shows as a container for a body of music.

As the 15 compositions, which comprise the band’s forthcoming fifth album took shape, Applebaum brought the rest of the band, string arrangements from Will Marshal and a talented crew of collaborators including Megan Mancini (vocals), Romi Hanoch (vocals), Stephen Chen (saxophone), Billy Aukstik (trumpet), Mike Sarason (flute), James Kelly (trombone), Stuart Bogie (reeds) into the studio with a newfound confidence acquired by heavy touring to support 2022’s A New Kind of Love. Sonically, A Trip To The Moon is a departure from the clean production of their predecessors, as the the sessions players were allowed to let it rip, breathing life and their personal voices into the material.

A Trip To The Moon‘s first single, the cinematic instrumental track “To The Moon!” begins with the transmissions of the Apollo crew to Mission Control, remarking on the things they’re seeing as they’re orbiting the Earth, 21 minutes into their journey. A voice from Apollo informs Mission Control that they’re flying over The Canary Islands before dramatic drumming and a slithering bass line and quivering keys set a dreamy introduction. At the 45 second mark, a swaggering horn line and funk jazz guitar lines burst into the scene, creating the sense that the listener might be listening to the soundtrack to one of the greatest stories ever told, the creation and the eventual exploration of the cosmos by humankind or an episode of Star Trek. The composition ends with a mind-bending Dark Side of The Moon/Wish You Were Here guitar solo that gently fades out into the ether.

The composition seems to accurately capture a period specific sense of hope that science and technology could solve humanity’s most pressing problems, while doing some incredibly cool stuff. If only it were that easy, right?

A Trip To The Moon is slated for a February 23, 2024 release through Karma Chief Records. Click here to pre-order.