Today, STRFKR release their brand new album Parallel Realms via Polyvinyl Records. The album distills STRFKR’s 15 plus years of artistic growth without forfeiting any of the perspective they’ve gained along the way. It’s their clearest, most organized, and most exciting work yet. Alongside the album release, the band have shared the video for their new track ‘Holding On’ directed by Wes Eisenhauer, featuring the band’s Josh Hodges walking in and out of various scenes shot across their recent headline UK/EU tour and on a trip to New York City.
Speaking on the new album, Josh Hodges shares: “The album is about the constantly shifting nature of one’s perception or reality, especially about another person and their own shifty nature, and the way those two realities or points of consciousness interact. Basically about the dynamics between two people.”
In a journey that’s been taking new directions since it started, every step of the way has led STRFKR to Parallel Realms. The band’s energetic, danceable pop has assumed many forms since they first emerged in 2007, always reliably delivering unshakeable melodies and larger-than-life anthems infused with intellectually challenging lyrics. In recent years, STRFKR explored more experimental waters when they constructed a fuzzy dream world with their home-recorded 2020 album Future Past Life or subtracted structure entirely from fully instrumental collection Ambient 1. Parallel Realms finds yet another path, redefining the kind of direct, high-impact songwriting that’s long been the core of the band’s strongest material.
Across their career and with each project they have released STRFKR have allowed themselves to explore a range of musical avenues, Parallel Realms is no different. The record is an outlier in regard to the band’s approach, now very purposefully relieving the pressure they usually apply when writing and recording, they have instead leant into more relaxed writing sessions and even handed over mixing duties to Chris Coady (Beach House, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Blonde Redhead), reportedly the most hands-off they have ever been in the final step of any of their records. This followed Parallel Realms’ tendency toward collective creation, and Coady’s mixing rivalled anything the band had achieved before. The rhythm sections are huge, the hooks are crystalline, and the entire album gels into a cohesive, dynamic whole. Gone are any hints of “indie” calibre production; these songs sound enormous, with a level of glitter that contends with modern commercial radio hits.
Parallel Realms
1. Always / Never
2. Holding On
3. interspace 2
4. Feelings
5. Together Forever
6. Under Water / In Air
7. Armatron
8. interspace 3
9. Chizzlers
10. interspace 4
11. Running Around
12. Carnival
13. Lot Of Nice Things
14. interspace 5
15. Waited For It
16. Something To Prove
17. Leaving
