ELVIS DEPRESSEDLY, the much beloved lo-fi bedroom recording project of Mat Cothranand Delaney Mills have joined Run For Cover Records in anticipation of their upcoming full length, New Alhambra. Set for release next Spring, the band are sharing a video for the album’s first single, “N.m.s.s.” via The Fader. Speaking about the video, Cothran shared:
“We shot the video one afternoon while we were trapped on the Blue Ridge Parkway in the midst of a thick, beautiful fog that rolled in suddenly. I spent most of my child hood playing on the rocks in the rivers near my house and the day it self was reminiscent of that. We also cut in footage of hardcore pro wrestling, made famous at the New Alhambra arena in Philadelphia, from which we got our album’s name.
The video, like the song is about escaping the burdens of sadness by returning to a childlike state of inner peace and belief in magic.”
Elvis Depressedly are hitting the road in December on tour with New York based bedroom punks Told Slant, kicking off in Washington, DC on December 2nd. The bands will play cities throughout the East Coast, Midwest, and Canada. All dates and ticket links can be found below.
Dec 02 – Washington, DC @ DC9 [tickets]
Dec 03 – Asbury Park, NJ @ Asbury Lanes [tickets]
Dec 04 – Philadelphia, PA, @ Golden Tea House
Dec 05 – Brooklyn, NY @ Shea Stadium [tickets]
Dec 06 – Copiague, NY @ The Woodshop [tickets]
Dec 07 – New Haven, CT @ UANC [tickets]
Dec 09 – Boston, MA @ Middle East Upstairs [tickets]
Dec 10 – Montreal, QC @ La Vitrola [tickets]
Dec 11 – St. Catharines @ Mansion House [tickets]
Dec 12 – Toronto, ON @ The Cave [tickets]
Dec 13 – Grand Rapid, MI @ Bikeshop
Dec 14 – Chicago, IL @ Beat Kitchen [tickets]
Dec 16 – Cleveland @ Mahall’s [tickets]
Dec 17 – Pittsburgh, PA @ Mr. Roboto Project [tickets]BIO:
Elvis Depressedly stares straight into the void and airs their own blunt perceptions about it through their music, but it’s never been the band’s intentions to bring you down even if it says so right there in their name. Mathew Lee Cothran (also of Coma Cinema) and Delaney Mills — alongside a revolving cast of friends and collaborators — have been taking the monoculture’s obsession with a dystopian world and turning it into their own wry joke in their homespun quarters of South Carolina from the very beginning. Since 2011, EPs and singles built with a bare necessity of instruments and production tools have recorded a memory box of self-healing guitar-pop laced with an Ambien trance, but with Cothran quitting his day job and resettling in Asheville, NC with Mills after the release of 2013’s Holo Pleasures to focus his efforts on their latest full-length New Alhambra, an increased currency in time has resulted in Elvis Depressedly’s most definitive listen yet.
In many ways, New Alhambra is an auditory homage to what has shaped lead singer Mathew Lee Cothran’s life. Its title, as any hardcore pro-wrestling fan will recognize, credits the Philadelphia arena that birthed its most legendary and extreme version of it, and the use of samples from wrestling shows serve as a reference to his upbringing. The album was characteristically made with outdated equipment and limited by only one microphone, with Mike “Dr. Vink” Roberts playing an essential role on bass that enrichens the rockier resonations in comparison to Elvis Depressedly’s previous releases. Cothran and Delaney were constantly on the move during the recording process thanks to their new found career freedom, but none of it takes away from New Alhambra’s fully texturized shift toward brightly melancholic noise-pop inspired by Cothran’s favorite unsung heroes such as Waterboys, Prefab Sprout and Emperor X, and in more conventional instances, Elliott Smith and Mac DeMarco.
“There was a lot of uncertainty and I quit a job that I had had for 3 years but hated, and really kind of put it all on the line to make a record I really wanted to make. It was all a big risk,” says Cothran. That much is evident in the album’s centerpiece “Rock ‘N Roll” where his tongue quips at creativity’s value in the face of a greater stability. Elvis Depressedly may have gone for broke with their lives to make New Alhambra the album it is, but their decision to do so proves to be well worth the end result, self-deprecatory pains and all.
