Connecticut art punk trio Perennial are pleased to reveal their new single Tooth Plus Claw which is out now on Bandcamp. The track is the latest to be lifted from their second album ‘In The Midnight Hour,’ which will be released on CD & cassette on February 1, 2022, with vinyl coming March 1, 2022.
Commenting on the single, the band said: “With Tooth Plus Claw we wanted to make something absolutely ferocious, but without leaning exclusively on monolithic guitars to achieve that. So we started asking ourselves ‘How would this work if it were post-bop, or if it was dance music, or if we try something quiet where it would normally be loud, or a voice had to be the ‘riff’?’ It was a fun way of working outside of the typical post-hardcore math.” Listen to Tooth Plus Claw via Bandcamp below.
The answer came in part from the lovably daring albums that stuck out of their record collections — ‘We Are Paintermen’ by The Creation, ‘Horses’ by Patti Smith, ‘The Shape Of Punk To Come’ by Refused, ‘Sandinista!’ by The Clash. Take those guitars and drums, all that electricity and volume, and see just how many shapes you can make with it.
The New England post-hardcore three-piece started experimenting with structures, song lengths, instrument combinations; how loud a song could be but also just how quiet a song could be. Where a tambourine could replace a chord; where a bit of drum machine could stand in for a crescendo of guitars.
The band, who have been writing music for over half a decade together by this point, studied the joyfully bold art that inspired and encouraged them: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Ornette Coleman, Le Tigre, Otis Redding, Eric Dolphy, and Stereolab.
The album’s lead single, Perennial In A Haunted House, was released last month and picked up a flurry of support from highly-respected international underground music supporters including New Noise Magazine, Post Trash, DSCVRD, VISIONS Magazine, Vanyaland, Small Albums, The Alternative, The Grey Estates and more.
More about ‘In The Midnight Hour’
Perennial had recorded much of their 2017 debut The Symmetry Of Autumn Leaves themselves, but for this new album they brought in Chris Teti of The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die to engineer and co-produce. The goal: to capture both the band’s more adventurous new aesthetic while also translating Perennial’s feral live energy on the stage onto a record.
The team also started paying more and more attention to how a song filled the air in the room during their writing sessions. Which parts kept ringing; which moments felt like living things. When a certain rhythm or chord or melody stuck around, Perennial were quick to pick up the lesson. Along the way, they started writing lyric after lyric about night: about the giddy, ghostly quality of the witching hour; the way a quiet room can feel like a haunted house. That twilight aura seemed to match the sense of surprise they were increasingly pursuing as musicians.
Before long, ‘In The Midnight Hour’ had become a dozen odes to the nighttime, and the album’s sounds and silences became a matching suite, a punk album full of sudden quiet—a skeleton dance in a 12-room haunted mansion.
‘In The Midnight Hour’ will be released March 1, 2022
Live dates
17.12.21 – Troy Speakeasy – Troy, NY
18.12.21 – Mum’s House – New Brunswick, NJ
C'mon why don't you leave a comment here