Today, Friday, June 10th, we release our sixth* album, States of America, on Procrastination Records! We’re really excited to release this because we started writing and recording it at the same time we were working on our last two releases, Unknown Cities and Another Adventure in Red. But this album is particularly special to us because it is the first to feature our lyricist, Dan Gutstein, on nearly every track. It is also first one we fully engineered ourselves at the Princeton University Recording Studios and at Centre Street “Studio”, where we also filmed the music videos for several tracks on the album.
Many thanks to Mat Leffler-Schulman, Dan Coutant, Tommy Hambleton, Gareth Thompson, Bob Boilen, Brian Erickson, Bill Hafener, Ted Schreiber, Zach Herchen, Nick Luciano, Ray Rizzo, Mike Cuomo, Mika Godbole, Mark Isaac, Gabriela Bulisova, Brian Platzer, Dmitri Tymoczko, Jeff Snyder, Joe Martin, Mark Eichenberger, Juri Seo, Damien Davis, Daphne Bacon, Cody Snyder, Adam Lewis, Jacqueline Codiga, Singer Mali, and Bill Pierce.
And we’re super grateful to Robb at American Pancake for the kind words about our single “Happy Holidays.”
Listening to “Happy Holidays” and subsequently delving into the works of [Trenton, NJ]’s jazz punk group Joy on Fire had me doing some free form dancing (without the benefits of alcohol I might add) and I couldn’t help but think of iconic old school punk / alt rock artists like Gang of Four but especially the spastic jazz punk leanings of incendiary 70’s vocalist and saxophone charmer James Chance from The Contortions (later James Chance and the Contortions). Within Joy on Fire’s squirrely jazz punk sound featuring wonderfully, potently feral saxophone by Anna Meadors, jagged heavy bass and guitar by John Paul Carillo, Chris Olsen’s versatile drumming and Dan Gutstein’s darkly drawn existential words, “We’re all gonna spend a lot of time in graveyards” feels wonderfully manic.
Robb Donker Curtius, American Pancake
We’ll be playing an album release show at John and Peter’s in New Hope, PA, on Saturday, June 18th, and we have several dates along the East Coast in July — stay tuned for details!
You can also check out a playlist of all of our music videos that go with this album HERE!
*sixth album not including two 3RC albums and the Thunderdome EP