Caleb Nichols
Announces new album,
Let’s Look Back
out 13th October on Kill Rock Stars
Shares single/video for “Demon Twink”
Caleb Nichols announces his new album Let’s Look Back, out 13th October on Kill Rock Stars and releases the first single and video for “Demon Twink” – an unstoppable power pop rocket. “Demon Twink” possesses the greatest velocity of any song on the record and represents the middle section of the new abum, a “denial, anger, acceptance” triptych of tunes.
Nichols explains, “While “Demon Twink” sounds like a personal song about a toxic relationship, it’s really just a bit of a joke. I wrote it after reading the unfolding ‘Demon Twink’ drama on twitter back in 2021. I thought it would be interesting to imagine dating the infamous Demon Twink: the twink who crashed Britney Spears’ birthday party on a boat in the Hudson River and caused all sorts of mayhem. I mean, someone has to love this person, right? I imagined it would be difficult to be in a relationship with such a twink and that perhaps the result would simply be a lifetime of pain and abuse? Wouldn’t the Demon Twink want revenge if you decided to leave? A short thought experiment resulting in a fun little power-pop jam.
Time to get obsessed with the melodic movements of the latest track from Nichols. This intoxicating new track allows this gritty attitude to rise above the harmonious hooks and aggressive spirit of the lyrical direction. The passages breeze through these ardent shifts and inject a more raucous cadence into the composition. Caleb has this fearless approach to covering such vast territory through Nichols musical direction, always able to captivate his audience. “Demon Twink” delivers the very best.
On the video, Caleb says “We wanted to make a lyric video that would bring to life the textured, medieval collage pieces that we’ve used as album art for ‘Let’s Look Back’. Aaron Kroeger, our director and also live drummer, animated and colorized the art in a lovely, clever way. The giant black blob I’m standing on is a key symbol for this cycle of songs, and it’s fun and sort of gross to watch it drip! I don’t want to say much about the black blob, but perhaps it’s representative of either a sort of temporality which is always lurking beneath the surface of things. I have been watching a lot of Twin Peaks, so I guess my mind is stuck in the Black Lodge.”
Nichols put himself on the map with his first solo album, entitled Ramon, a critically acclaimed queer Beatles rock opera. With Let’s Look Back, he’s tackling something of a more radical proposition. “It’s about the idea that you have to look back and confront stuff before you can move forward,” Nichols says. “It’s about vindication, and reintegration, and trusting yourself.”
During his formative years, the queer poet and singer/songwriter made it through childhood abuse, family trauma and an estranged, incarcerated father. (To say nothing of the intensity of coming out as gay in a small town in the 1990s.) But Nichols was creative from the jump, and he employed art and poetry as psychological defence.
For Let’s Look Back, Nichols opted to unflinchingly address “what it means to be a survivor of abuse — not just childhood abuse, but other types of abuse, and self-abuse. All of the scarring and s—y stuff that you do when you’re that person, before you get better.”
The introductory lines of Let’s Look Back, opening track “Christmas, California,” lay out Nichols’ underlying philosophy over a bramble of acoustic guitars and jangling percussion: “Who said you can never come home?/ Who said you should never look back?/I think a liar said that.”
The California-raised artist had a front seat to the 2000s indie rock boom, as the bassist for Port O’Brien and leader of acts from Grand Lake to Churches to, most recently, Soft People – co-led with his husband, John Pomeroy.
Produced by Zach Rogue,Let’s Look Back, contains Nichols’ years in the indie rock trenches in microcosm. And more importantly, it’s about to dictate this queer indie-rock poet’s exceedingly bright future.
Caleb Nichols has been living in North Wales since autumn 2022, working on a PhD dissertation in queer ecopoetics at Bangor University. Nichols is writing a new body of work that will become a book of poems that meditates on queerness and nature.
Pre-order Let’s Look Back HERE
Caleb Nichols solo shows below:
11 August – London, Cavendish Arms
20 August – Birkenhead, Birkenhead Arts Palace
25 August – Belfast, The American Bar
26 August – Glasgow, Ushi’s (Weekender)
27 August – Glasgow, Ushi’s (Weekender)
28 August – Edinburgh, Typewronger
Let’s Look Back Tracklisiting:
Christmas, California
Demon Twink
The Absolute Boy
J’ai Vu La Lune!
Don’t You Ever
Limn
Stranged
Albatross
Blue Sky Blue
The Wires
Wicked
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