Good morning! “Wake Me Up,” the very last track on New Release, is today’s Top Tune on the largest NPR affiliate west of the Mississippi, the taste-making, music-forward, YACHT-supporting radio station KCRW.
They’re even offering up a free download of the song if you collect sound files. Shoutout to the DJs at the station (especially Travis Holcombe!) who are playing different songs off the record and shooting us up their charts. Last week we were the #2 most played artist on the station! Dare we dream of number one?
To celebrate, we made a present for you—a playlist of 36 songs that inspired the making of New Release. It covers everything from Swedish alternative rock and early LA art-punk to oughts radio hip-hop and sophisti-pop. You can listen to the Old Release Mixtape on Spotify and Apple Music. Enjoy!
Next—where’s the nearest public payphone to you? Does it still work?
In Los Angeles, the shells of old payphones are everywhere. A few of them still have handsets, but most are smashed to pieces. Unless you’re looking for them, they disappear into the background of the city. Apparently there are 700-odd working payphones in LA County, but we’ve only tracked down about a dozen.
We’ve always loved finding ways to re-activate old technologies. Back in 2015, we devised a way to send a preview of the I Thought The Future Would Be Cooler album cover to fans via fax machine. In 2018, we brought the Triforium, a dormant and massive piece of musical public art in downtown Los Angeles, back to life for three epic weekends.
Old technologies never really go away, at least not at all once: they linger for a long time in a state of semi-obsolescence. There’s something about taking advantage of that transitional window of time—when something has fallen out of use but is still pretty ubiquitous—that tickles our sense of latent possibility.
So we set up a voicemail inbox for New Release and have asked people to call it and leave reviews. It’s been, accidentally, the nicest thing we could do for ourselves. It’s so fun making outgoing messages for people to listen to, and even more fun listening to the voicemails as they come in.
Most of the calls we get are so sincere and personal; some are extended bits. We’ve been getting reviews from actual children. One guy calls pretty regularly to update us on what’s going on in his life. Someone sang a hymn. People who don’t even know the band are calling just because they saw the number posted online!
To highlight our favorite calls, we’ve been making videos where we pair voicemail audio with footage of payphones around Los Angeles. We’re calling it Video Voicemail. You can watch the videos on Instagram, and if you know of a good payphone in the LA area, please tell us where it is! We’ve already been to the “last payphone before the forest” in the Altadena foothills and the row of seven working payphones outside of the Men’s Central Jail downtown.
And don’t forget to call! The party line is always open:
It’s been a month since New Release was released. We’re so grateful for the love the album has received so far! This is our first entirely independent release, and it’s hard to imagine ever going back. With no PR or label, we’ve sold hundreds of records, racked up hundreds of thousands of streams, and gotten airplay on radio stations all over the world. Feels good.
If you want to pick up a physical copy of New Release, you can still get a “Second Wave” vinyl edition from Metalabel, which comes with a password-protected ZIP file full of interesting files from our desktop and a full audio commentary track. Or you can pick up the LP on Bandcamp and get a high-quality digital download of the record at the same time.
Either way, we ship every single LP, cassette, and t-shirt ourselves.
What next?
On October 12th, Claire will be in conversation with the author Jonathan Lethem at Hauser & Wirth Gallery in Los Angeles; they’ll be talking about New Release and Lethem’s new book Cellophane Bricks. Free.
Love,
Jona, Claire, and Rob
PS - If you’re interested in phones and phone history, may we recommend: