ADULT MOM share pensive acoustic single 'Benadryl' | THE LABEL
Photo Credit: Bao Ngo

ADULT MOM share pensive acoustic single ‘Benadryl’

/
5 mins read

Indie rock quartet Adult Mom release their new single,’Benadryl’, a stark & deeply affecting meditation on illness, isolation, and the quiet terror of survival. Another preview of their upcoming record, Natural Causes out May 9 via Epitaph, the album was born from years of personal and global upheaval where grief and rage burn bright enough to guide the way forward. Over a strummed acoustic guitar and a mournful French horn, vocalist Stevie Knipe (they/them) delivers a performance that feels almost unbearably intimate.“‘Benadryl’ is a song about going through chemotherapy when I first got diagnosed with breast cancer in 2021,” Knipe reflects. “I wanted the writing and production to reflect the distinct isolation that comes from cancer treatment and illness, and how little by little, things start to feel a little bit brighter, and then dark again.”

Natural Causes Out May 9 Via Epitaph.

‘Benadryl’ : WATCH | LISTEN

On their fourth record Natural Causes, Knipe, the group’s principal songwriter and lead vocalist, wrote the songs between 2020 and 2023 during a period of both global tumult and personal upheaval. Arriving in the wake of intensive cancer treatment in their late twenties, the experience brought them into direct confrontation with their own mortality. As they started writing songs from that vantage, they found they could stare down difficult memories of abuse and toxic relationships with a new ferocity.
“Feeling like you’re a prisoner in your own body to medical professionals makes you very sad, also very angry. There were nights where I would have full tantrums. I felt like a 13-year-old just from the pure anger of it,” says Knipe. “You revert to this childlike state of, “This is not fair!”It unlocks those other moments in your life when you were like,“This is not fair.”
Though Knipe has been out as queer and non-binary since Adult Mom’s debut, their relationship to their identity, like many queer artists’, has evolved and revealed itself in long waves. They came out as a lesbian after writing Adult Mom’s lauded 2021 album Driver, and many of the songs on Natural Causes cut through the knots of compulsory heterosexuality and coerced gender normativity. Getting more deeply in touch with your own queerness can feel liberating and thrilling; it can also thaw out oceans of anger you never knew you had from all the times you had to stay alienated from yourself to survive.
After years of deep friendship and creative collaboration, the members of Adult Mom cultivated an environment of powerful trust that allowed them to play, experiment, and take risks while recording. They invited additional musicians to join them at Artfarm Recording studio in NewYork’s Hudson Valley in order to weave orchestral flourishes into the record. James Richardson stopped by to play horns, Maeve Schallert layered strings, and Andrew Hoben – Knipe’s former neighbour – contributed piano. The band folded each of them into their communal artistic practice, inviting them to compose and arrange their parts onsite rather than working from pre-written sheet music.
“It was a very communist practice of making a record. It was the whole band and our engineer Chance [Milestone], and we were all making choices as a unit,” says Knipe. “Every guitar tone, every sound that you hear was all decided together. We’re all the collective producer. I’ve never made a record like that before.” With Natural Causes, Adult Mom hammer home the revelation that self-knowledge is not a destination. It’s an active movement, and it’s one you can’t embark on by yourself. Each of us emerges, suffers, and heals in relationship to other people; to really get to know ourselves, we must reach beyond our own edges.
Adult Mom is Stevie Knipe, Olivia Battell, Allegra Eidinger and Lily Mastrodimos.
Natural Causes Tracklisting:
2. 21
3. Benadryl
5. Burned Off
6. Matinee
7. You In June
8. How About Now
9. Headline

Tags:

You might be interested in

Previous Story

ADRIANNE LENKER announces 2 hour, 43 track live album

Next Story

MRCY share new single ‘Wandering Attention’

Latest from Blog