Palm Ghosts share new single ‘The Dead Inside’

Nashvile’s Palm Ghosts have shared The Dead Inside, the latest pre-release single lifted from their full-length album, ‘Lifeboat Candidate’ out March 19 (pre-order). Listen to The Dead Inside via YouTube below. About the song Palm Ghosts’ Joseph Lekkas says: “The unrelenting The Dead Inside is sonically influenced by three decades of music. 90s drum and bass sounds mixed with 70s funk and 80s post punk. The drums for this song were based on a James Brown groove and were entirely recorded on an iPhone 6 in New Jersey and emailed to Nashville. We pieced together the song with the drums and arpeggiated synth as the centerpiece and added call and response guitars and vocals. It’s equally dance-y and menacing.” 

The Dead Inside is available now on all streaming platforms. 

Last month, the band shared Blind the first single to be lifted from ‘Lifeboat Candidate’. The official video for the song, which was created by band member Ben Douglas, debuted at Post-Punk and track is on all streaming services add to your favourite playlists. About the song Post-Punk says, “The social unrest of Summer 2020 and the confines of quarantine proved creatively fruitful for Palm Ghosts. Due to the limitations of travel and interaction, they took matters into their own hands during the recording process, primarily through email. The result is ‘Blind,’ a gorgeous, tribal-infused track with equal hints of Peter Gabriel, The Teardrop Explodes, and Gang of Four.” Equal hints of Gang of Four and Peter Gabriel, Blind was written and recorded during the social unrest of Summer, 2020. The single was one of the first songs from the forthcoming album and demonstrates the tribal rhythm that permeates the entire record. This song also set the tone for the recording process of the entire record in which the band emailed track ideas, instrumentals, song structures, lyrics and melodies. The fruits of that labor resulted in the album, ‘Lifeboat Candidate,’ a dark and dystopian effort, filled with confusion and dread, albeit with a bit of humour and hope. The album is a relentless statement, not giving a pause between tracks to breathe like the micro machines spokesman, yet as suave as Dean Stockwell in Blue Velvet.  

Palm Ghosts has a long history, as Joseph Lekkas has carried the name since his Philly days when the project had an indie folk sound. It is the current iteration of the band that sounds more like a clap back to the sound for which Nashville is notorious. Embracing their 80’s idols, like New Order, The Cure, David Bowie, John Carpenter and even Divine, these Nashville transplants released 2018’s ‘Architecture’. With a steady stream of singles and EPs, the band has continued to write music that sums up the lot of their 80’s influences, but ‘Lifeboat Candidate’ marks their most cohesive effort to date.

‘Lifeboat Candidate’ album details

Like most bands in 2020, isolation fueled a new immediacy and energy in their songs that only a year of pandemic, protest, and political turmoil could elicit. Blind, the album opener, is about suspicion and paranoia standing in the way of truly seeing people, and consequently sounds like a comment thread of mired arguments over an underlying harmony. The frenzied Dead Inside is almost an extension of that theme, where the narrator is frozen in the space between self preservation and empathic change when becoming aware of a world bigger than their own, yet ultimately deciding to treat the epiphany as a con. Because we aren’t completely pessimistic, we thought you should also check out Carry the World, inspired by stories of family separation in scientology and the struggle against beliefs that make strangers of those closest to you. In the verses, one party pleads with the other to leave the belief and the chorus responds…favourably.  We aren’t completely hopeless, but then this was before our city was bombed by a 5G conspiracy terrorist.  

‘Lifeboat Candidate’ track list 

1. Blind
2. Easy Math
3. The Kids
4. Revelation Engines
5. Carry The World
6. Lifeboat Candidate
7. The Perfect Tool
8. The Dead Inside