Tri-costal indie-rock act Mamalarky announces their fourth studio album, Hover, out February 12. Fresh off their tour with Freak Slug, the band shares a video for poetic new single ‘Sad Songs,’ a delicate blend of nimble fingerpicking, woozy synths, and hazy harmonies.
“To me, it sounds like the first sunny day after a week-long depressive episode, the day when you remember to drink water again and find symbolism in everything but are definitely not okay yet,” shares vocalist/guitarist Livvy Bennett. “I hope it offers company to anyone going through loneliness, loss, and general confusion of the heart. Sometimes you’re left only with a sad song or two to make sense of some bullshit, the sole survivors of a world of hurt.”
Mamalarky – ‘Sad Songs’ (Official Music Video)
Hover finds Mamalarky – vocalist/guitarist Livvy Bennett, keyboardist Michael B. Hunter, drummer Dylan Hill, and bassist Noor Khan – at their most uninhibited and assured, drawing on years of unbridled discovery and dreaming up a daring convergence of indie-rock, chamber-pop, and spacey psychedelia. Produced and engineered by Bennett and Hunter, the record’s spellbinding sound came to life at their home studio in Glendale, CA. Once serving as an old Hollywood backdrop artist’s studio, Hunter notes, “I think you can really feel the room and its history across the new record.”
Along with cutting most of Hover’s rhythm tracks to tape, the album was heavily shaped by the band’s DIY ethos, “we do a lot of things ourselves that we don’t necessarily have to,” says Bennett. To shape the record’s earthy, yet mercurial sound, Mamalarky captured everything from the delicate jangle of wind chimes to field recordings of bells and rain, even transforming their studio into a makeshift echo chamber feeding vocals through a guitar amp.
Every moment of the record is imbued with the strange magic of Mamalarky’s musical interplay, as they journey from the breezy intimacy of the album-opener ‘Relic’ to the epic outpour of ‘How Could You Go’. You can hear their ever-growing alignment as they drift into the sweetly dazed reverie of ‘Sycamore Tree’ to the feverish, dizzying synths of ‘Uh Oh.’
Throughout Hover, the band has embraced an even greater boldness in redefining the limits of their musical expression, hoping to instill that same sense of adventurousness in others. “We want to lean into uncertainty and risk,” says Bennett. “It’s so easy to get trapped in old ideas of who you are, and challenging those ideas can feel really scary and uncomfortable. But we hope ‘Hover’ can be a reminder that every day is a chance to become who you’re meant to be.”
Mamalarky
Tracklist
- Relic
- Sad Songs
- Sycamore Tree
- Eye Contact
- Uh Oh
- Never Love You Right
- That Girl
- Mirage
- Word for Word
- Sweet Tooth
- The One
- How Could You Go
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