PICKLE DARLING shares “Invercargill Angel”

Pickle Darling (Lukas Mayo they/them) shares their synthy new single “Invercargill Angel“, which premiered just hours ago by U.S. magazine FLOOD Magazine.

The latest single is accompanied by a celestial video directed by Aimee Cooki Martin. 

On the track, Mayo offers: “This was one of the last songs I wrote for the album. I came up with the kind of repeating mantra bit on a long drive and just sang it in my head for an hour so I wouldn’t forget it. It came together reasonably quickly, maybe the quickest song on the album to write! As for the video, uh me and my friends got some burgers and went to hang out on the beach to celebrate the album being finished, and I have no memory of what went down but luckily my friends captured it all on film…”

“Invercargill Angel” leaves plenty of space for the bedroom experimentation to expand in several directions at once before fading out to an ear-splitting hum.” 

– FLOOD MAGAZINE

Watch the video for Invercargill Angel here: made with the support of NZ On Air 

Last month the Ōtautahi/Christchurch artist & producer Pickle Darling announced their new album and shared their vulnerable lo-fi pop celebration, “Head Terrarium”, accompanied by an abnormally delightful video, directed by Martin Sagadin (Aldous Harding, Marlon Williams, Nadia Reid, Soaked Oats).  

Preempting the album announcement was the release of the first single, King of Joy, as their signing to U.S. label, Father/Daughter Records was made official and Lukas jetted off one music industry’s largest festival events SXSW held in Austin, Texas to perform at his new label’s showcase. Watch video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNAcgItFL4Q

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Design & layout by Thomas Barrer

About Pickle Darling:

In her 2009 short story collection, writer Lydia Davis creates worlds in tiny spaces, some totaling only two sentences. Steering away from the rigidity of what a piece of art is meant to look like, Ōtautahi.Christchurch -based artist Lukas Mayo (they/them) took inspiration from Davis, and others, to find the magic in the mundane. Art is everywhere: in the shape we make out of a napkin while waiting for our coffee to arrive, in the text we send to a friend in need, in the beat we make on the steering wheel while stuck at a red light. As Pickle Darling, Mayo points past perfectionism, and leans into the art of the everyday, where these ever-evolving forms of creativity find their home in new album Laundromat.

Their previous albums Bigness (2019) and Cosmonaut (2021) elevated their lo-fi indie pop with a rounded-out, cleaner sound, garnering acclaim in their ability to zoom in on the universality of existential thought with an earnest yet playful approach. The reaction to the releases, and an extensive touring schedule, brought with them a kind of expectation–one that Mayo says began to wear on them. “I felt that I couldn’t just follow my instincts anymore,” they say. “I wanted to return to how I made music right at the very start.” Those instincts flourish throughout Laundromat, where the immediacy of Mayo’s creative aptitude permeates. Here, Pickle Darling slots into the silhouettes of the ordinary and stretches them onto an entirely new canvas.

Laundromat was created in what Mayo describes as their first stable living situation, away from difficult flatmates, tense surroundings, and abysmal landlords. As an artist who writes, records, and produces all of their music at home, the security of their current place allowed their ideas to blossom. Writing soon became a daily practice, and rather than labouring over each song like they had previously–some songs on previous records were months and months in the making–Mayo found themselves drawn to the spark of what had created the initial idea in the first place. “For it to be a daily practice I have to focus on what it is that I enjoy about it,” they say. “I became really excited to make music for myself again––to just enjoy making music again.”

Mayo highlights folk artists Connie Converse, Bill Fay, and Vashti Bunyan as passengers in the process of Laundromat; artists who put music into the world then disappeared from the public eye. “I wanted to capture the feeling of making music that’s out of step with everything around it,” they explain. “I wanted it to be a lot more immediate.” Mayo recorded a lot of Laundromat’s ideas onto their phone, giving themselves permission to allow those ideas to be the entire song. The enforced length of what a song should be––a neat, 3-minute sellable product––has always bothered Mayo, and while some of the songs on Laundromat do fit around that particular mold, Pickle Darling says the smaller pockets on the album were them striving to create their “own kind of normal.”

This new-found normalcy developed after Mayo immersed themselves in William Morris’ book News from Nowhere, inspiring them to merge art and daily life. “I was thinking a lot about music and art in the same way as doing your chores,” they say. Everyday life sprinkles itself throughout Laundromat, where Mayo threads together voicemails from their close friends Bedbug (“Kinds Of Love”) and Tony Stamp (“More Kinds Of Love”), with familial difficulties, intrusive swirling thoughts and falling down a digital rabbit hole.

Laundromat is Pickle Darling creating their own tiny worlds, but ones that are large enough to welcome anyone who might need them. It’s a reminder that we can escape into art at any given moment, and how those moments might help us onto the next. Whether it’s the swirling kaleidoscope of a washing machine on spin, or the melody of your friend’s voice, Laundromat places a frame around the beautiful nothing, sculpting these moments into something tangible and noteworthy.