When he’s not producing and penning brilliant idiosyncratic pop in projects like Water From Your Eyes or My Idea, the hyperprolific Nate Amos flies solo as This Is Lorelei. After 33 EPs (!!!!) of sprawling off-the-cuff experimentation – most of it being pure slam dunk fun –, Amos now opts for a more traditional rollout. This Is Lorelei’s long-awaited debut album (again, !!!!) Box For Buddy, Box For Star will be out June 14 via Double Double Whammy.
Its lead single “Dancing In The Club” carries on Amos’s oddly consistent ability to reconcile vastly different stylistics into a perfect pop statement. “Dancing In The Club” is an oddball, strangely gorgeous fusion of 1975-ish synth pop and bleeding-heart country ballad – even the autotuned vocal effects don’t spitshine or cheapen the cracked and earnest melancholy in Amos’s voice. For good measure, Amos sprinkled in some sparkling Bruce Hornsby piano’s, majestic horns and (but of course!) a lyrical nod to Steely Dan. Though lyrically and sonically all over the place – somehow funny, winsome and pathetic all at once – the song maintains its emotional heft as we experience Amos’s defeatism in a stream of consciousness way. Amos explains “Dancing In The Club” is “a riff on the ‘playing the heel’ romantic fuck-up archetype — it was supposed to be a character study and I guess it is but it turns out the character was just me.”
On Box For Buddy, Box For Star, he says the following. “I had just finished a tour with Water From Your Eyes, during which I laid on the ground at Stonehenge for 40 minutes and decided to stop smoking weed. Initially, this album was just a challenge to make music without getting high, and I was worried I wouldn’t come up with anything at all. I isolated myself from pretty much everyone and wrote songs all summer. I was pretty broke and significantly depressed, but also in a sort of healthy mental demolition mode, trying to reimagine how I wanted to move forward with my life. For better or worse, what I made ended up being a delayed recovery album, largely dealing with more significant addictions that I kicked a year earlier.”
Preorder Box For Buddy, Box For Star here. Watch the video for “Dancing In The Club” below and find it on streaming platforms.
TOUR DATES:
03/04 – Boston, MA @ The Rockwell *
03/05 – Winooski, VT @ Monkey House *
03/06 – Montreal, QC @ La Sala Rossa *
03/07 – Toronto, ON @ The Garrison *
03/08 – Cleveland, OH @ Happy Dog *
03/09 – Chicago, IL @ Schuba’s *
03/12-14 – Austin, TX @ SXSW
03/15 – New Orleans, LA @ Gasa Gasa *
03/16 – Tallahassee, FL @ Retrofit Records ^
03/18 – Durham, NC @ Rubies on Five Points ^
03/20 – Washington, DC @ Rhizome ^
03/21 – Philadelphia, PA @ MoMA 2 ^
* w/ Omni
^ w/ fantasy of a broken heart
Follow Nate Amos/This Is Lorelei on Facebook, Instagram and Bandcamp .
