An unsuspecting Bret McKenzie gets zapped into a series of strange encounters in the bizarre (and humorous) official video for “If You Wanna Go” from Songs Without Jokes, directed by Ezra Simons (who also directed McKenzie’s “A Little Tune” visual).
 
Songs Without Jokes is available to preorder from Sub Pop. LP preorders through megamart.subpop.com, select independent retailers in North America, UK and Europe will receive the limited Loser Edition on blue vinyl (while supplies last).
 
Songs Without Jokes, which features the aforementioned “If You Wanna Go” and “Tomorrow Today” along with “Dave’s Place,” and “A Little Tune,” was produced by Mickey Petralia and McKenzie, mixed by Darrell Thorpe, with songs recorded at East West Studios and United Recordings, and mastered by Dave Ives at 101 Mastering in Los Angeles.

Bret McKenzie
Songs Without Jokes
 
Tracklisting:
1. This World
2. If You Wanna Go
3. Dave’s Place
4. Here for You
5. That’s L.A.
6. Up in Smoke
7. Carry On
8. A Little Tune
9. America Goodbye
10. Tomorrow Today
11. Crazy Times

You can now hear new contributions to the Sub Pop Singles Club Vol. 7 from Hunx and His Punx and The Shadracks, both out today worldwide on all DSPs from Sub Pop. And you can now watch the music video for the Hunx and His Punx track here.
 
Hunx and His Punx is a West Coast band formed in 2009 by Seth Bogart (aka Hunx) with Shannon Shaw (Shannon & The Clams) and Erin Emslie (Secret Stare). “White Lipstick” b/w “Lose My Mind” is their first new release since 2013’s Street Punk. “White Lipstick” - named after an as-yet-unmade John Waters movie - is about being a queer teenager seeing women perform in bands and wanting to be just like them. “Lose My Mind” is a reflection on how terrible the world is, America’s abundance of guns, and wanting to give up and die, but deciding instead to keep fighting. It’s about thinking Fuck, what should all the women and queers and weirdos that don’t like guns do? Do we need them to protect ourselves? It’s about hating guns. Hunx and His Punx will celebrate the release with three shows: August 25 in Portland, OR; October 29 in Austin, TX; and October 31 in Brooklyn, NY at the 17th Annual NY Night Train Haunted Hop Halloween Spooktacular with Martin Rev (Suicide), Christeene, and many more.
 
The Shadracks are a three-piece rock n’ roll group hailing from Medway, Kent, and “Time Slips Away” b/w “Hollow and Uncertain” is their contribution to the Singles Club. “Time Slips Away” talks of the tribulations of making peace with the absolute judge. It’s about yearning to find out who you could be, instead of who you’re told you are. With timeless and expert precision the Shadracks play from 37.3 years in the past 33.7 years into the future. The actual origins of the group date back even further with their cultural appropriation of Babylonian ‘Rhythm and Punk’. A mere 4 years ago Huddie Shadrack and Elisa Abednego had a brief encounter in deserted parkland. Discovering a shared interest in vacant park benches, herbaceous borders and beat music it became paramount that they form a group, which they did on recruiting Rhys ‘Nebuchadnezzar’ Webb on bass guitar. The Shadracks celebrate the single’s release with an August 24 show at Paper Dress Vintage in London.
 
Subscribe to the Sub Pop Singles Club Vol. 7 to get twelve exclusive, limited-to-1,000-copies, colored-vinyl 7” records that you will, undoubtedly, love and adore. In addition to the Hunx and His Punx and The Shadracks singles announced today, subscribers will get 7”s by Bartees Strange, Dummy, Irreversible Entanglements, Party Dozen, Matthew “Doc” Dunn, The William Loveday Intention (feat. Billy Childish!), Sidney Gish, and more TBA. Vol. 7 runs from April, 2022 through February, 2023.
 
The Sub Pop Singles Club Vol. 6 series included subscription-only 7” singles by John Waters, Kim Gordon/J Mascis, Jeff Tweedy, Duma, LIDS, Washed Out, Hand Habits, Porridge Radio, Sheltered Workshop Singers, TV Priest, BNH Deluxe, and The Black Tones. Hear music from the series via the Singles Club playlist, and grab one of the very few remaining subscriptions here (we only made 1,000 and they’re almost gone!).

Hunx and His Punx

“White Lipstick” b/w “Lose My Mind”

The Shadracks

“Time Slips Away” b/w “Hollow and Uncertain”

On October 21st, 2022, Frankie Cosmos will release Inner World Peace, their fifth album, on CD/LP/CS/DSPs worldwide from Sub Pop. The album, which features “One Year Stand” and additional standouts “ F.O.O.F.”, “Aftershook,” and “Empty Head,” was co-produced by Frankie Cosmos, Nate Mendelsohn, and Katie Von Schleicher at Figure 8 Recording in Brooklyn, New York, mixed by Mendelsohn and Von Schleicher, and mastered by Josh Bonati at Bonati Mastering. The Inner World Peace album art also features illustrations from band member Lauren Martin.
 
In the sweet and tender official video for “One Year Stand,” directed by Eliza Lu Doyle, and starring Frankie Cosmos’s Greta Kline and Alex Bailey, Greta does an interpretive dance using the song’s lyrical theme of accepting new love while acknowledging that your past is part of who you are.
 
Eliza offers this, “We conceived of the setting for the video as a cross between a diorama and an empty arena stage. To me, the interaction between Greta and the camera is almost like an act of faith — a reach toward an absent audience. We wanted to channel the pleasure of half-performing for that imaginary gaze.” 
 
Greta elaborates further, “This music video was created with my best friend Eliza, who makes video and performance art. It feels like an encapsulation of the record in that it’s strange and vast while also being contained and interior. Clowning and playing are a huge part of collaborating for me and Eliza. We wanted to perform a dance without dancing — the kind of movements you fall into in private, banal moments, playing without even realizing. Choreographing together felt like we were in 6th grade again, all id and giggles. The album and the video were made in these environments of love and pleasure.”

 
Inner World Peace is available for preorder now from Sub Pop. LP preorders from megamart.subpop.com, select independent retailers in North America, the UK and Europe, will receive the album on crystal clear vinyl (while supplies last). There will also be a new T-shirt design available.

Frankie Cosmos has scheduled an Inner World Peace release show in Queens NY on October 7th 2022 at Knockdown Center’s The Ruins. Hannah Jadagu and Ian Sweet will be opening.
 
About Inner World Peace by Katie Von Schleicher:
Several things happened before a warm day when I met the four members of Frankie Cosmos in a Brooklyn studio to begin making their album. Greta Kline spent a few years living with her family and writing a mere 100 songs, turning her empathy anywhere from the navel to the moon, rendering it all warm, close and reflexively humorous. In music, everyone loves a teen sensation, but Kline has never been more fascinating than now, a decade into being one of the most prolific songwriters of her generation. She’s lodged in my mind amongst authors, other observational alchemists like Rachel Cusk or Sheila Heti, but she’s funnier, which is a charm endemic to musicians.
 
Meanwhile Frankie Cosmos, a rare, dwindling democratic entity called a band, had been on pandemic hiatus with no idea if they’d continue. In the openness of that uncertainty they met up, planning to hang out and play music together for the first time in nearly 500 days. There, whittling down the multitude of music to work with, they created Inner World Peace, a collection of Greta’s songs changed and sculpted by their time together. While Kline’s musical taste at the time was leaning toward aughts indie rock she’d loved as a teenager, keyboardist Lauren Martin and drummer Luke Pyenson cite “droning, meditation, repetition, clarity and intentionality,” as well as “‘70s folk and pop” as a reference for how they approached their parts. Bassist/guitarist Alex Bailey says that at the time he referred to it as their “ambient” or “psych” album. Somewhere between those textural elements and Kline’s penchant for concise pop, Inner World Peace finds its balance.
 
Instant centerpiece “One Year Stand” is a small snowglobe of intimacy recalling the softest moments of Yo La Tengo’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out. Lifted by Martin’s drones on Hammond organ and synthesizer, it could be played on repeat in a loop. I like to think it’s obvious how Greta’s vocals were recorded: late at night as we all sat by in low light, transfixed as she sings “I’m not worried about the / rest of my life / because you are here today / I go back in time / I’m a cast iron.” The voices of Kline and Martin, who have sung together since middle school, blend seamlessly.
 
The first order of business upon setting up camp in Brooklyn’s Figure 8 studios was to project giant colorful slides the band had made for each track. Co-producing with Nate Mendelsohn, my Shitty Hits Recording partner, we aimed for FC’s aesthetic idiosyncrasies to shine.The mood board for “Magnetic Personality” has a neon green and black checkerboard, a screen capture of the game Street Fighter with “K.O.” in fat red letters, and a cover of Mad Magazine that says “Spy Vs. Spy! The Top Secret Files.” On tracks like “F.O.O.F.” (Freak Out On Friday), “Fragments” and “Aftershook,” the group are at their most psychedelic and playful, interjecting fuzz solos, bits of percussion, and other sonically adventurous ear candy. An internal logic strengthens everything, and in their proggiest moments, Frankie Cosmos are simply a one-take band who don’t miss. When on Inner World Peace they sound wildly, freshly different, it may just be that they’re coming deeper into their own.
 
Throughout the album there are plays on the notion of feeling seen or invisible, as in “Magnetic Personality” when Kline sings “ask me how I am and I won’t really say,” or in “One Year Stand” when she says “maybe I’m asking myself.” Kline emphasizes that this was her first group of songs in years that weren’t written while on tour, but rather with ample time on her hands. She reflects on past selves in “Abigail” (“that version of myself I don’t want back”) and “Wayne” (“Like in first grade / How I went by Wayne / I always had / another name”). If we’re alone, what becomes of the things we see? As in “Fruit Stand,” Kline asks “If it’s raining and I can’t feel it, is it raining?”
 
Inner World Peace excels in passing on the emotions it holds. When in the towering “Empty Head” Kline sings of wanting to let thoughts slide away, her voice is buoyed on a bed of synths and harmonium as tranquility abounds. When her thoughts become hurried and full of desire, so does the band, and she leaps from word to word as if unable to contain them all. As a group, they carry it all deftly, and with constant regard for Kline’s point of view.
 
Says Greta, “To me, the album is about perception. It’s about the question of “who am I?” and whether or not the answer matters. It’s about quantum time, the possibilities of invisible worlds. The album is about finding myself floating in a new context. A teenager again, living with my parents. An adult, choosing to live with my family in an act of love. Time propelled us forward, aged us, and also froze. If you don’t leave the house, who are you to the world? Can you take the person you discover there out with you?”

Frankie Cosmos
Inner World Peace

Tracklisting
1. Abigail
2. Aftershook
3. Fruit Stand
4. Magnetic Personality
5. Wayne
6. Sky Magnet
7. A Work Call
8. Empty Head
9. Fragments
10. Prolonging Babyhood
11. One Year Stand
12. F.O.O.F.
13. Street View
14. Spare the Guitar
15. Heed the Call

Today, Bret McKenzie is sharing two new tracks titled “If You Wanna Go” and “Tomorrow Today,” from Songs Without Jokes, his forthcoming new album. Uncut says of the album, “Baroque-pop delight. Evocative of Harry Nilsson and Randy Newman at their most extroverted. McKenzie’s songs provide great warmth (8/10).”
 
Written mostly during the quieter moments of 2019, with his life split between work in Los Angeles and his family in Wellington, the songs of Songs focus on themes of escape, the perpetual search for peace, and navigating a life being pulled in multiple directions at once. There are also simple meditations on driving through a city and the weather. McKenzie was inspired by the path his aforementioned idols like Newman and Nilsson had paved, where a silly or playful number could be sandwiched directly between a song about heartbreak or an earnest redemption and a scathing satire or character commentary. He threw a bit of everything into the mix, recording ideas on his phone at home in New Zealand after the kids had gone to sleep. Upon returning to LA, he would play the sketches for his longtime producer and collaborator, Mickey Petralia, who helped McKenzie identify the best moments, then together they would add parts and shape the songs. From there, longtime film collaborator Chris Caswell created charts for that same ensemble of session players with whom they’d recorded so many pieces for film. The majority of songs were then recorded at United Studio in Los Angeles in just a few takes.
 
Songs Without Jokes is available to preorder now from Sub Pop. LP preorders through megamart.subpop.com, select independent retailers in North America, UK and Europe will received the limited Loser Edition on blue vinyl (while supplies last).
 
Songs Without Jokes, which features the aforementioned “If You Wanna Go” and “Tomorrow Today” along with “Dave’s Place,” and “A Little Tune,” was produced by Mickey Petralia and McKenzie, mixed by Darrell Thorpe, with songs recorded at East West Studios and United Recordings, and mastered by Dave Ives at 101 Mastering in Los Angeles.

Bret McKenzie
Songs Without Jokes
 
Tracklisting:
1. This World
2. If You Wanna Go
3. Dave’s Place
4. Here for You
5. That’s L.A.
6. Up in Smoke
7. Carry On
8. A Little Tune
9. America Goodbye
10. Tomorrow Today
11. Crazy Times