Last month, French-American duo Pearl & The Oysters announced their third album Flowerland, which to be released September 3 on Chicago’s Feeltrip Records. The album is intended as the final installment of their ‘Florida Trilogy’, which includes their 2017 self-titled debut and their 2018 follow-up Canned Music. We already heard the single “Treasure Island”, a tribute to the strange town on the state’s Gulf Coast, and today they share another track called “Soft Science”, which features Kuo-Hung Tseng of Taiwanese jazz-pop act Sunset Rollercoaster.
The song opens quietly with a twinkling melody yet quickly settles into a pleasant mid-tempo groove. (Listeners may be reminded of artists like Toro Y Moi.) Members Juliette Davis and Joachim Polack engage in a call-and-response that centers around the debate of staying in and studying or enjoying a day outside, a dilemma many of us may remember from our university years. Speaking on the single, the duo explains:
“In this semi-autobiographical chorus-less duet, grad school anxiety materializes into an argument between lovers, the premise of which was inspired by nouvelle vague tropes surrounding domestic ennui: x wants to go to the beach, but y is hesitant because they aren’t done reading and “soft science is hard” (silly we).”
Watch the psychedelic video for “Soft Science”—with animation done by Salvador Cresta—below, or listen to the song on streaming platforms.
Pearl & The Oysters’ new album Flowerland is out on September 3 via Feeltrip / Tip Top Recordings. You can find the band on Facebook and Instagram.
