Elvis Depressedly, the much beloved bedroom recording project of Mat Cothran and Delaney Mills are gearing up for the release of their upcoming full length, New Alhambra, on Run For Cover Records. After a recent tour with Alex G, they are also playing US dates with Mitski and Eskimeaux in June and July.
With New Alhambra out NOW in the US, and June 8th in the UK, you can listen to the album in full BELOW:
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Vice premiered the band’s captivating video, sharing their sentiments, “People hurt other people, and shame and regret can really fuck with your head. That’s the territory Elvis Depressedly explores in their new video”. Directed by Micah Van Hove, the video is a breath-taking accompaniment to the band’s single, a contemplative journey through youth, innocence, despair, and death, with a wistful and wondrous beauty. Van Hove expanded on his video, sharing:
“Mat’s music has always made me think about death, but always through the lens of love. You’d be hard pressed to make it through a conversation with Mat or one of his albums without hearing a jubilant death wish, but I’ve always understood it as an expression of an overbearing feeling of love; a heart so heavy with love for this world and its people that the idea of death is merely a joke – a joke we tell our friends and lovers to keep them close, to remind them that the present is the most important gift we have.
For me, the words and melodies on New Alhambra are bathing in a sense of reclaimed innocence that compelled me to explore how a child internalizes the notion of death for the first time.”
You can also watch the video to their last single, “Thou Shall Not Murder”, BELOW:
Elvis Depressedly stares straight into the void and airs their own blunt perceptions about it through their music, but it’s never been the band’s intentions to bring you down even if it says so right there in their name. Mathew Lee Cothran (also of Coma Cinema) and Delaney Mills – alongside a revolving cast of friends and collaborators – have been taking the monoculture’s obsession with a dystopian world and turning it into their own wry joke in their homespun quarters of South Carolina from the very beginning. Since 2011, EPs and singles built with a bare necessity of instruments and production tools have recorded a memory box of self-healing guitar-pop laced with an Ambien trance, but with Cothran quitting his day job and resettling in Asheville, NC with Mills after the release of 2013’s Holo Pleasures to focus his efforts on their latest full-length New Alhambra, an increased currency in time has resulted in Elvis Depressedly’s most definitive listen yet.
In many ways, New Alhambra is an auditory homage to what has shaped lead singer Mathew Lee Cothran’s life. Its title, as any hardcore pro-wrestling fan will recognize, credits the Philadelphia arena that birthed its most legendary and extreme version of it, and the use of samples from wrestling shows serve as a reference to his upbringing. The album was characteristically made with outdated equipment and limited by only one microphone, with Mike “Dr. Vink” Roberts playing an essential role on bass that enrichens the rockier resonations in comparison to Elvis Depressedly’s previous releases. Cothran and Delaney were constantly on the move during the recording process thanks to their new found career freedom, but none of it takes away from New Alhambra’s fully texturized shift toward brightly melancholic noise-pop inspired by Cothran’s favorite unsung heroes such as Waterboys, Prefab Sprout and Emperor X, and in more conventional instances, Elliott Smith and Mac DeMarco.
“There was a lot of uncertainty and I quit a job that I had had for 3 years but hated, and really kind of put it all on the line to make a record I really wanted to make. It was all a big risk,” says Cothran. That much is evident in the album’s centerpiece “Rock ‘N Roll” where his tongue quips at creativity’s value in the face of a greater stability. Elvis Depressedly may have gone for broke with their lives to make New Alhambra the album it is, but their decision to do so proves to be well worth the end result, self-deprecatory pains and all.
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