It’s been six years since Pure X released their 2014 album ‘Angel,’ the last in a run of three critically-acclaimed LPs from the band’s beginning in 2009. During the break, the band mates developed the movies of their own lives—scattering for a fresh start, having children, traveling, making other music. In 2018, Pure X quietly “reformed”. It was time for the legacy album, the still standing album, the slick backed, silver bracelet, black and white gravitas on the rocks album. After two years of writing, then recording live as a band, their fourth, self-titled album sounds expensive and wise. These are not songs of resignation, but of unsentimental empathy, of understanding one’s surroundings and when it’s time to move on. They have announced their return from their extended hiatus with two new singles Middle America and Fantasy, as a preview of their forthcoming self-titled album due out via Fire Talk Records on May 1st. Listen to the tracks via YouTube below.
“Pure X is the last band, has always been the last band. Not that there won’t be future acts, more that Pure X understands that all this pageantry, this civilization is wrapping up. It burned hot and bright like thermite used to bust a safe open, but now is the age of radiating waves, each one buckles the foundation more than the last. It would be understandable to express such forbidden fatalism in a brittle, harsh nihilism, the stark echo of a stone rattling down an endless well. But on this album, their fourth and first in six years, there is a pre-dawn kindness. It may be funereal, but it is a Viking pyre ablaze in the middle of a river, one of those moments when the water seems to pause and reflect the clouds blooming like smoke from an invisible glass pipe.Recorded live in the bucolic Texas Hill Country, this is their clearest, most focused work. The rhythm section is locked in–a night train through the desert. There is more singing, the weary wisdom of the lyrics ringing like Tibetan bowls. In 38 minutes, Pure X weave a culmination, all the delays and distortion, the grinding mortar of touring, the low-tide pulling them out from a cult band, to a legacy band, it’s here, understood and forgiven. This album is a guide, it will comfort you through this long bruised twilight. It’s time to leave the fantasy, to play the game.” – Neil Fauerso
Track list
1. Middle America
2. Hollywood
3. Angels of Love
4. Free My Heart
5. Making History
6. Fantasy
7. Man With No Head
8. How Good Does It Get
9. Slip Away
10. Grieving Song
11. Stayed Too Long
12. I Can Dream
Pure X will be released on May 1st 2020 digitally, July 3rd physically in addition Fire Talk will re-issue the band’s first two records ‘Pleasure’ and ‘Crawling Up The Stairs‘. It‘s available for preorder here.
