Pretty Lightning share new single 'The Slow Grinder'
German psych-blues duo Pretty Lightning are today releasing ‘The Slow Grinder’, lifted from their new album ‘Dust Moves’, out July 29 on Fuzz Club Records. A piece of hypnotic, swirling desert blues, ‘The Slow Grinder’ is streaming below. Pre-order the LP here.
Since forming over a decade ago, the Saabrücken-based band are now on their fifth full-length, have toured around the UK and Europe on numerous occasions and shared stages with the likes of Moon Duo, Clinic, Kikagaku Moyo and Night Beats, among many others. Arriving following their 2020 LP ‘Jangle Bowls’, ‘Dust Moves’ is the band’s first fully instrumental record and offers up a cinematic journey through meandering desert blues, strung-out psych-rock and widescreen, hypnotic drones.
“We´ve been thinking about recording an instrumental album for a while because we particularly like the fluid movement it can create”, Sebastian Haas says, citing contemporary instrumental artists like 75 Dollar Bill and Bobby Lee as influences alongside library music and the experimental synths of Mort Garson or Syrinx. “Even if these can be considerably different in genre or style, they can share a similar mood, it’s somehow about ‘sound’ rather than ‘song’.”
“Making this record always felt a bit more like sound explorations, less like writing songs”, he continues: “We focused on using new instruments like the mellotron, a self-made box of creepy tricks and making guitars sound like they were actually not guitars. Words or lyrics would have just had a restrictive effect here and that wasn´t what we were aiming at. In this manner, the songs on this record resulted from jams and evolved into repetitive and simply flowing instrumental pieces. It was a tonne of fun to make.”
On the new single out today which follows last month's ‘Gewgaw For Beginners’, Haas says: “The Slow Grinder was the first song that emerged when we had started fiddling around with the idea of an instrumental record and I think it laid down the base or structure of the entire album. Everything that happened afterwards is somehow following the same formula of repetition and sounds that build-up, swell and spread while remaining on the path. Simple music, easy to follow and to dig in, if one is up for it.”
