Memphis trio Optic Sink (NOTS) announce new album, out 31st October on Feel It Records
Memphis trio ft. member of NOTS
FFO Total Control, Boy Harsher, Belgrado, Lust for Youth, The Serfs
Optic Sink
Announce new album, Lucky Number
Due 31st October on Feel It Records
Share new single, "Don't Look Down" - watch the video here
Lucky Number, the third album from Memphis trio Optic Sink, finds the band both refining and expanding their hypnotic mix of post-punk and dance music, resulting in a sharp and moving exploration of surfaces, shadows, and self-delusion.
The album will be released 31st October via Feel It Records, and today the band also unveil lead single, "Don't Look Down", a dark, magnetic exploration of alienation and hope, with accompanying video directed Micky Thordarson / Low Budget Films.
“You found a hand to hold / don’t look down,” singer and lyricist Natalie Hoffmann (also of NOTS) declares over Keith Cooper’s punchy, Pylonesque bass lines and Ben Baumeister’s subtle breakbeat. “there’s a chain link fence to break your fall / don’t look down.”
Optic Sink - "Don't Look Down"
Spotify / Apple / Tidal
Video: https://youtu.be/e0zYM9Y3zdI
Album Preorder:
https://www.feelitrecordshop.com/collections/preorders
Hoffmann wrote the foundation for "Don't Look Down" while stuck in a Nashville hotel room earlier this year. She shares: “I was there working on a TV show and ended up snowed in at a Candlewood Suites by the highway that overlooked the train tracks. To get out of the hotel room, I would go down to the parking lot and watch the trains that went by in the snow. I became sort of obsessed with them. I thought there was something both beautiful and eerie about their movement and sounds.”
Video director Micky Thordarson (Low Budget Films) adds: “The lyrics with the repeated references to the sky, passing trains, and a snowy landscape helped naturally create inspiration for a visual narrative. How do you fit all of these elements together with a video in the middle of summer? Throw in some mystique camera angles playing on duality, time, and space while filming in downtown Memphis.”
"Don't Look Down" was produced and recorded by Caufield Schnug of Sweeping Promises over the course of a single session in their studio in Lawrence, KS, and Sweeping Promises bandmate/partner Lira Mondal makes a striking cameo with haunting stacked harmonies.
Previous praise for Optic Sink...
"While most bands are busy attempting to develop an overwhelmingly full sound, OPTIC SINK takes the opposite course and leaves vast expanses of audible space. Pop delivery is tempered with frosty dissociation, all while synthesized noises develop fresh euphonious environments." - Maximum Rock N Roll
"Hoffmann’s craggy singing is set against a stark backdrop of analog synthesizers and a drum machine—the jittery noises become a wellspring of shattered nerves and unpredictability." - The New Yorker
"The band embraces a slippery strain of synth-punk, feeling like heirs to the cross pollination of punk and disco that led to unlikely pop offerings from Lizzy Mercier Descloux, Cristina, and X-Ray Pop." - Raven Sings The Blues
"...an eerie seam between Suicide’s synthy menace, Devo’s robotics and early female-dominated post-punk, the Raincoats and LiliPUT especially." - Dusted
"stripped-back, electronics-heavy postpunk exploration" - Chicago Reader
More about Lucky Number...
Natalie Hoffmann (NOTS) has come into her full power as a lyricist. Her work on earlier records (see “Modelesque” and “Glass Blocks”) shows her talent for exploring the hidden shallows of modern life, but here the funhouse mirrors are balanced by painful longing and drops of truth that leak through the cracks. The music reflects this—under Bauermeister’s driving grooves and the songs’ tight arrangements lurk hidden complexities, thanks in part to Keith Cooper’s exceptional, angular work on guitar and bass.
“Unreachable / untouchable space / glass tower / a fragile face / when you’re here / where do you go?” Hoffmann sings over the sinister, nocturnal funk of “Construction.” Few bands can match the hard beauty of Depeche Mode, New Order, and A Certain Ratio - Optic Sink manages to do more than that, adding their own sad, cutting wisdom.
- Written by Dan Hornsby of True Green / author of Sucker and Via Negativa
Tracklisting
1. Laughing Backwards
2. Lucky Number
3. Construction
4. Don’t Look Down
5. How Can I Help You?
6. Golden Hour
7. Kinetic World
8. Luxury of Honesty
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