Black Doldrums' new single 'Now You Know This' out now. Debut album 'Dead Awake' out March 11 via Fuzz Club Records.
London-based group Black Doldrums are today sharing ‘Now You Know This’, the third single to be lifted from their forthcoming ‘Dead Awake’ album. Produced by Jared Artaud (The Vacant Lots, Alan Vega), the ‘Dead Awake’ LP is due out March 11 2022 via Fuzz Club Records and arrives following two sold-out EPs (most recently 2019’s ‘She Divine’) and tour dates around the UK, EU and US. Arriving following recent singles ‘Sad Paradise’ and ‘Into Blue’, you can stream ‘Now You Know This’ below and pre-order the LP here.
On the new single, Kevin says: “Some inspiration for this came after watching a Daniel Johnston documentary, notably the song ‘I Live My Broken Dreams'. It always struck me as a perfect folk tune and I loved the delivery. It reminded me of an acoustic song I had written a few years ago called ‘Now You Know This’ which had a similar hook so I decided to play it with the band and it developed into a full song. The verses are intentionally put together to feel like a news-reel broadcast.” ‘Let me tell you now, the state of all things’, Kevin sings before describing selfish and greedy elites, fatal rioting on the streets that is met with media silence and underfunded public services leaving the sick and the poor ‘on their own to survive'.
Originally a duo founded by Sophie Landers (drums) and Kevin Gibbard (guitar/vocals) but now recently fleshed out to a trio with Matt Holt joining on bass, Black Doldrums deal in a dark, shoegazing psych that melds gothic post-punk with a leather-clad rock’n’roll spirit. Having cultivated a die-hard following in the UK psych underground, Kevin and Sophie set to work on their long-awaited debut album in 2020. Their original plans were to travel to New York to record the album with Jared Artaud of fellow label-mates The Vacant Lots however the pandemic and ensuing lockdowns and travel restrictions inevitably put a stop to that. Instead, they recorded the album in London with Artaud producing and mixing the album remotely from Brooklyn.
“It made for an interesting collaboration as the distance could have been an obstacle”, Sophie recalls, “but it actually helped creativity as we were more inclined to stay in touch and have really decent phone calls at length discussing the songs in a lot of detail. We really enjoyed those conversations with Jared about music and all of our influences. I think you can hear on the record that it is a full collaboration.” The more collaborative effort of ‘Dead Awake’ finds Black Doldrums switching gears and adopting a cleaner, more precise creative approach than that of their earlier material.
“The idea was to be absolutely brutal with our songs and cut them down to what we only felt was necessary”, Sophie remembers: “Up until this point we had been experimenting and were happy with what we had created but we no longer felt the need to hide behind too much reverb and an excessive amount of guitars. It still sounds like us but it has all the elements needed to stand the test of time.” The result is an album that feels colder and more stripped back – the effects are still there but stripped down to their fundamentals so that the songs themselves take precedence over any wall-of-sound deliria.
