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DOLDRUMS – SHARES NEW SINGLE ‘LOOPS’

March 5, 2015

eb633b19-4590-49ba-945f-b5fed9d5f922DOLDRUMS

 – SHARES NEW SINGLE ‘LOOPS’

– NEW ALBUM ‘THE AIR CONDITIONED NIGHTMARE’
OUT APRIL 6TH ON SUB POP

– EUROPEAN TOUR IN MAY

““Loops” is one of the most welcoming, club-friendly things they’ve done yet. Don’t think for a second that means Doldrums are going soft, since ‘Loops’ quickly begins stretching and warping until it sounds like three different songs fighting each other for dominance with Airick caught in the middle” – FACT
Doldrums precede the release of their exhilarating new album with another new track, the album’s lead single ‘Loops’.
Premiering on Radio 1 last night, the track gives a tantalizing snippet of the confrontational & innovative sounds you can expect from their second full length, ‘The Air Conditioned Nightmare’, which is due out on April 6th throughSub Pop.
“This is a song for anyone who has been stuck in a vicious cycle with a partner” explains Airick Woodhead. “It’s about the emotional intelligence it takes to recognize the pattern and the courage to break free from it.”

The title ‘The Air Conditioned Nightmare’ was spawned by Henry Miller upon his return to the US after ten years as an expatriate. Keen to rediscover the country he left behind, Miller found it a stifling place of big business, pollution, credit, misinformation and prejudice. In short: a spiritual, moral, cultural and aesthetic vacuum. “Nowhere else in the world,” he wrote in his 1945 collection of essays “is the divorce between man and nature so complete”.

Seventy years on and the book lends itself to the title of the anticipated second album by Doldrums, the band lead by 25 year old musician Airick Woodhead. On the follow-up to the 2013 debut Lesser Evil, the DJ, producer and performer makes a sizeable leap from being darling of the same fertile Montreal warehouse creative explosion that gave the world the likes of Grimes, Majical Cloudz, Blue Hawaii to simply being a stand-alone artist and composer on the cusp of something quite special.

Evolving into a full live band, Doldrums craft musical montages, paint sonic pictures from a new palette, construct sounds using leader Airick’s own unique architectural blueprint. They apply a punk rock ethos to electronic music, creating songs using samplers and DJ gear in place of guitars. Bold, anxious, dream-like, uplifting, glacial, hypnotic, constricting, expansive, alien – this is an album that is ever-changing.

“Conflict is at the heart of this album,” explains Airick. “There’s a lot of paranoid sentiment and Dystopian imagery in there. The threat of a mundane reality ties it together, as does an obsession with plasticity”.

The Air-Conditioned Nightmare is an album of texture and taste, an extra-sensory overload. Weaving through the mix are Woodhead’s own androgynous, tweaked vocals singing snatches of lyrics like voices down broken phone-lines.

See Doldrums live:

Apr. 09 – Montreal, QC – Bar Le Ritz

Apr. 15 – Boston, MA – Great Scott*
Apr. 16 – Philadelphia, PA – Barbary*
Apr. 17 – New York, NY – Mercury Lounge*
Apr. 18 – Brooklyn, NY – Baby’s All Right*
Apr. 19 – Washington, DC – DC9*
Apr. 21 – Atlanta, GA –  Aisle 5*
Apr. 24 – Houston, TX – Fitzgerald’s*
Apr. 30 – Los Angeles, CA – Echo*
May 02 – San Francisco, CA – Rickshaw Stop*
May 04 – Seattle, WA – The Sunset*
May 05 – Portland, OR – Holocene*
May 08 – Minneapolis, MN – 7th Street Entry*
May 09 – Chicago, IL – Empty Bottle*
May 15 – Copenhagen, DK – Pop Revo Festival, Atlas
May 16 – Rome, IT – Spring Attitude Festival
May 19 – Lille, FR – La Peniche
May 20 – London, UK –  Electrowerkz (Tickets)
May 21 – Dublin, IE – Hidden Agenda @ Whelans (Tickets)
May 22 – Bristol, UK – The Louisiana (Tickets)
May 23 – Manchester, UK – Soup Kitchen (Tickets)
May 24 – Glasgow, UK – Stereo (Tickets)
May 26 – Brighton, UK – The Hope (Tickets)
May 27 – Bruges, BE Cactus
May 28 – Amsterdam, NL – OT301
May 29 – Paris, FR – Le Pop Up Du Label
May 30 – Bordeaux, FR – Iboat
Jun. 02 – Cologne, DE – Studio 672
Jun. 03 – Hamburg, DE – Volt
Jun. 04 – Berlin, DE – Privatclub
* w/ Moon King

 

Praise for Doldrums’ debut album Lesser Evil (2013):

“Doldrums’ frequently multi-tracked falsetto is the icing on an appealingly irregular cake.” – 8/10, Uncut
“A fine album” – 8/10, Pitchfork
“A unique new voice in experimental pop” – 5/5, The Skinny
“A raw thrill that excites just as much as it challenges” – 8.5/10, The 405
“You’ll be gripped, you’ll be astounded, and while you might not exactly know why, you’ll love this” – 8/10, The Line of Best Fit
“He’s taking the blueprints of hooky dance tracks and hacking them up into psychedelic freak-outs with cavernous, big room sounds” – 8/10, Clash
“Thrilling and chaotic. Like a good new party drug, ‘Lesser Evil’ finds a sweet spot” – 7/10, NME
“Relentless in its attempts to make you dance. The range here is delicious” – 7/10, DIY
“Peer beneath the cosmic tetchiness and there’s an underworld of whirring thematic cogs” – Drowned in Sound
“A more intense & unsettling version of Grimes’ eldritch pan-global pop” – Guardian Guide
“Extremely clever. This is music for high times.” – Loud & Quiet
“The most free-spirited, intrepid release of the year so far” – 4/5, The Fly
“A feast of mad tribal beats, brass & choppy synths” – Time Out

The Air Conditioned Nightmare tracklist:

HOTFOOT

Blow Away
Funeral For Lightning
We Awake
Video Hostage
Loops
iDeath
My Friend Simjen
Industry City
Closer 2 U

 

Links:

Doldrums on Twitter

Doldrums on Facebook
Doldrums on Soundcloud

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