Surprise Physical Release
First Edition of "New Release" available right now!
LET’S GET PHYSICAL—FIRST
Surprise! Our new album New Release is here, now! We’ve made a very special First Edition of 100 albums and we’re shipping them out today.
We’re trying something new. We’re releasing New Release on vinyl a full month before the album goes out wide. We love physical media and believe in the experience of human contact with a lovingly-designed and packaged album.
So we’ve partnered with Metalabel—a new space to co-release and collect creative work—on an experimental, physical-forward release format.
WE CALL IT THE “REVERSE PREORDER”
New Release will not be streaming until August 31st. But if you buy the vinyl directly from us on Metalabel, we’ll ship it immediately, giving you a month to live with the record before anyone else even hears it. And there’s more…
We’re starting with 100 hand-numbered “First Editions” of New Release. Each comes with a signed and stamped letter and a little envelope containing a password, which will unlock a password-protected ZIP file of computer candy. An audio commentary track for the album encoded at a shimmering 8 kpbs? Check. Behind-the-scenes videos we’ll never post? Check. Never-before-shared files from Jona’s computer? Check.
Why? For fun! Every inch of this album was recorded, produced, designed and imagined by us. A pallet of LPs came to our house on a FedEx freight truck a couple days ago and we’ve been giddy getting them ready for you. They’re pressed on bright yellow vinyl because that made us happy. We spent a full morning hand-stamping every shipping box, an afternoon putting three stickers on each LP, and an evening signing and stamping a hundred letters.
New Release is the first physical release on our private label, Paris by Night. We’ve been doing this for a long time, and it’s never been harder out there for musicians—but at the same time, we’ve never been more certain that the only thing in life that matters is making art with (and for) our friends. It’s impossible for a band like ours to compete with the major movers in the playcount thunderdome, but we love what we do, we stay true, and we couldn’t do it without you.
As our friend Yancey Strickler recently wrote, we’ll never win by pandering to the algorithm. We have to focus on building alternatives of our own:
“The answer is not a new tool or technology. The answer is a new spirit. The world does not need more media, it needs New Media.”
The world needs…a New Release.
Love,
Jona, Claire, and Rob
PS - Join us in wishing good luck to our very own Claire L. Evans, who’s about to leave for a monthlong MacDowell writing fellowship in the New Hampshire woods. She gets back the day New Release comes out digitally. Is the timing ideal? No, but we’re leaning into it—sort of a Rivers-goes-to-Harvard thing.
The First Edition sold out in 90 minutes, so we set up a Second Wave. Buy here:
https://parisbynight.metalabel.com/new-release-second-wave
It’s official: a Second Wave is coming soon!
We’re exhausted from editing the video, writing the Substack, and packing the first 100 orders. A good kind of exhausted though!