Portland post punk band SOFT KILL have shared new single and music video “Roses All Around”, coming from their new LP called “Dead Kids, R.I.P. City”, to be released on November 20th, 2020 through Cercle Social Records.
𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑎𝑐𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑝𝑎𝑛𝑦𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑣𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑜 𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝑠ℎ𝑜𝑡 𝑖𝑛 𝑑𝑜𝑤𝑛𝑡𝑜𝑤𝑛 𝑃𝑜𝑟𝑡𝑙𝑎𝑛𝑑, 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑖𝑡 𝑟𝑒𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑖𝑛𝑛𝑒𝑟 𝑠𝑝𝑖𝑟𝑖𝑡 𝑜𝑓 𝑠𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝑠𝑡𝑟𝑢𝑔𝑔𝑙𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑑𝑟𝑢𝑔 𝑎𝑑𝑑𝑖𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛.
A story odyssey of sorts told in ten parts, ten songs – each track essentially a character – “Dead Kids…”, produced by David Trumfio (Built To Spill, Wilco, OK Go) and mastered by the legendary Howie Weinberg (The Cure, Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana), explores, through a beguiling mix of personal memory, allegory, and narrative structures by turns both poetic and stinging, a long and complicated relationship with a dark version of Portland OR. It’s songs that tell of the fractured and fragile legacies of those lost during the city’s last couple decades as it moves from soggy backwater to unheard of growth and tech-fueled transformation.
Two years in the making, desperate, redemptive, its contrast of light and shadow favoring the latter, Dead Kids, R.I.P. City is like no other album in the genre, a kind of doom pop Drugstore Cowboy featuring the brave and abandoned, the tender and the afflicted, all teetering in memory on the edge of the city. For all the sadness and pain of addiction haunting it, however, the record, by its very existence, proves that hope doesn’t necessarily win but that, even if at great cost, it can. It’s what makes Dead Kids, R.I.P. City so powerful beyond just the scope of its dark luminous sound and indelible melodies, and is one of the many reasons you’ll carry it with you.
