Nashville experimental duo Total Wife announce new album via Julia's War
TOTAL WIFE ANNOUNCE NEW ALBUM
COME BACK DOWN
ARRIVING SEPTEMBER 19, 2025
VIA JULIA’S WAR RECORDINGS
HOPEFUL LEAD SINGLE
“SECOND SPRING” OUT NOW - LISTEN
ALBUM RELEASE TOUR TO BE ANNOUNCED,
SUPPORTING DUMMY AT THE BLUE ROOM ON OCTOBER 2
“With a band prolific as Total Wife, it’s a challenge to pin
down their music as any particular sound.”
- NASHVILLE SCENE
“Off-kilter indie-eclectic sound”
- TURN & WORK
Nashville experimental duo Total Wife, the project of Luna Kupper and Ash Richter, are excited to announce their new album, Come Back Down, out September 19, 2025 via the tastemaking Philadelphia label Julia’s War Recordings. Heralding the announcement is “second spring,” a fuzzed-out sonic journey through sweet melodies and new beginnings, harnessing the hope of change over churning guitars.
“Ash started the lyrics for this song in early spring of 2020, and worked them out over the next few years before Luna wrote this song, which helped her finish them," says Total Wife. “Hard to remember, but flowers will bloom with or without you,” is from the same poem that “Reveal Sky,” was written from (total wife Self-Titled LP, “It’s easy to forget that it’s spring, staring through grey-blue drywall”). “
LISTEN TO “SECOND SPRING”
PREORDER COME BACK DOWN
Total Wife has become a fixture of the East Coast DIY scene over the past decade, cementing themselves as scenemakers in Nashville, TN. Come Back Down marks the duo’s first full-length album since 2023’s in/out, building upon their varied and rich discography. The record was previewed late last year with the band’s 0 EP, featuring heavy-hitting tracks “naoisa” and “(dead b).”
Total Wife will be touring the new record across the East Coast, with tour dates to be announced soon. In October, they’ll be supporting Los Angeles band Dummy at The Blue Room. For more information and to stay updated on upcoming dates, see below and follow Total Wife on Instagram at @totalwife.
TOTAL WIFE LIVE 2025
JULY
26 - The Duchess - Nashville, TN
OCTOBER
2 - The Blue Room - Nashville, TN
TOTAL WIFE
COME BACK DOWN
JULIA’S WAR RECORDINGS
Release Date: September 19, 2025
1. in my head
2. peaches
3. internetsupermagazine
4. naoisa
5. second spring
6. still asleep
7. chloe
8. (dead b)
9. ofersi3
10. make it last
ABOUT TOTAL WIFE:
Come Back Down, the new album by Nashville experimental-pop duo Total Wife, was born from the edge of sleep. When composer and producer Luna Kupper would begin to fall asleep during late-night mixing sessions, the songs would follow her into the halfway place between dream and lucidity. Like Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks, she’d wake with a new perspective on the puzzle she was piecing together. “I’m a psychological mixer — I’m trying to think of how someone’s experiencing the sound, versus getting stuck in trying to make all these different tones and using all this gear to make something sound a certain way,” Kupper says.
And like a spiral from waking life into dream, the songs on Come Back Down are endlessly self-referential, building whole universes from a single point. Kupper sold all of her synths to make rent before she started working on the album, and so every inorganic sound is instead built from samples of the band’s own work. A guitar on one song may be reprocessed and used as a synth on the next, while everywhere on the album vocal samples are taken from a single unreleased cover of Elliott Smith’s “Between the Bars.” In tribute to this process, the album was almost named The Julia Set after the mathematical equation which feeds into itself again and again, creating beautiful fractal images. The intention was to create something complex but accessible; experimental, yet precise and without abstraction.
In her lyrics, too, lyricist and vocalist Ash Richter is as straightforward as she’s ever been. She drew on her experience of pandemic isolation to write about connection and disconnection, using her lyrics as a tool for the communication that was missing in everyday life. On the soaring, shoegazey track “peaches”, a storm that forced the cancellation of a recording session became a metaphor for emotional distance. “still asleep” chronicles Richter’s euphoria after Total Wife’s first tour, and watches it begins to curdle into paranoia. “Thank the full moon, my heart is overflowing,” she sings, before: “Is there such a thing as too happy?” The experience of isolation was prompting Richter to think back to her childhood, a time marked for her by solitude and natural play — climbing trees, making mud pies, getting lost in the woods. On tracks like “in my head” and “second spring”, she uses the imagery of nature to recall that time and forge a connection with her lonely inner child. “I feel connected with transcendentalist writing and magical realism — trying to convey things in a concrete way, but with that element of psychology and mystery,” she says.
Richter and Kupper, friends from high school, formed Total Wife in 2016, relocating from Boston to Nashville in 2020. Both are visual artists as well as musicians, which they incorporate into their work with Total Wife via layered and purposeful visuals. A DIY streak underpins everything that they do — from handling their own artwork and music videos to recording their own music, releasing tapes through their label Ivy Eat Home, and hosting house shows in the basement they’ve christened Ryman 2. In Nashville, they’ve settled into a weirdo scene living under the record industry’s floorboards, a hive of collaborative and creative energy that has made them excited to call the city home. They’ve also assembled a live band for the first time, injecting their creative process with a jolt of spontaneity and aliveness that has fed back into Come Back Down.
ABOUT JULIA’S WAR RECORDINGS:
Julia’s War Recordings is a community-based record label out of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but serving the greater world as a whole. Founded by Douglas Dulgarian of They Are Gutting A Body of Water in 2021, we aim to provide physical media for bands that rock, for people pushing the boundaries of music and creation in the modern day.
CONNECT WITH TOTAL WIFE:
BANDCAMP | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | INSTAGRAM
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