Fire Talk 2020 in Debut Albums
We’re looking back at our 2020 and although it was exceptionally wild we managed to release an amazing spread of debut albums). Highlights below and stream them all in our New Singles Playlist!
Mamalarky spent two years working on their self-titled debut album (out via Fire Talk on November 20th). Raw and cerebral, the LP looks to a range of influences from their collective musical nerdiness. ''We might have a vocal melody that sounds like the lead steel guitar from Santo & Johnny, played over production that aims to be noisy and weird like Deerhoof or Sheer Mag, all the while steeped in the greats like Stevie Wonder or The Four Seasons,' explains Livvy. The album itself was cobbled together in a mix of DIY ways: home recordings with Livvy’s roommate Joey Oaxaca (White Reaper, Mo Dotti), singles with Daniel McNeill (White Denim) and a “final wrapping-up” with engineer Jim Vollentine (Spoon, Skating Polly). The result is an album that’s as musically fun and explorative as it is catchy and sweet. Or as Mamalarky puts it “We want to provide an experience that's exploratory and trippy, but far removed from the problematic and corny psych stereotypes carried out by all those 60s dude bands.”
1st Pressing
Creamsicle Vinyl - 400 units
Black Vinyl - 300 Units
Bright Red Vinyl - 300 Units (Indie Retail Exclusive)
Inspired by Throwing Muses, Helium, Pale Saints, and Brix Smith-Start’s work with the Fall, Hanging Garden, the debut album from Philadelphia based Corey Flood reflects “a reckoning with internal discord.” From the surface, its nine tracks appear to break through the dark fog of the Wish You Hadn’t EP, but just below lay themes of ambivalence, uncertainty, and anxiety, layered elegantly in fuzz. Soft melodies, lush guitars, and churning rhythms shroud relatable tales of gaslighting and self-doubt. Playful surprises also abound, like 70s krautrock guitar work and samba-influenced drum parts.
On the trance-inducing “Slow Bleeder,” Gray-Klein’s chronic anemia becomes a metaphor for her fear of getting too close to people. "Bands of light cross my room at night / drinking my own poison again,” she sings on the intimate and delicate “Park Deli 7.” As she experimented with writing lyrics for the very first time, Gray-Klein found herself “stuck on a lot of self-destructive, cyclical thinking.” Hanging Garden was recorded at Headroom Studios in Philadelphia, PA by Jackie Milestone, mixed by Natasha Jacobs and mastered by Sarah Register and will be out September 4th 2020 on Fire Talk.
1st Pressing
300 Light Pink Vinyl
200 Black Vinyl
Lunch Money Life make apocalypse music, impossible to categorise, rich in texture, immersing the listener in a world of disgust and yearning - 'Immersion Chamber' is the perfect embodiment of that. Full of foreboding energy, restless beats and agitated noise: it's mardy electronics married with tense jazz-tinged and combative drumming. Or what The Quietus calls ““dizzying drum machines, wistful guitars, and brass sounds that punch through the miasma”. Each track filtered through the outboard analogue ceremonies of co-producer & mixing engineer Danalogue (The Comet Is Coming). Immersion Chamber will see a North American release October 30th on Fire Talk.
1st Pressing
Clear Vinyl - 300 Copies
Black Vinyl - 400 Copies
Royal Blue Vinyl (Indie Retail Exclusive) - 300 Copies
‘Exercise’ is the debut solo album from Chicago based engineer and producer Dave Vettraino. Having contributed to numerous Fire Talk releases including mixing Dehd’s acclaimed ‘Flower of Devotion’, producing and mixing both Deeper’s ‘S/T’ and ‘Auto-Pain’ as well as contributing to records from Ohmme, Lala Lala, Melkbelly and acting as the label International Anthem’s in house engineer with contributions to projects from Makaya McCraven and Gil Scott-Heron, Reservoir, Jaimie Branch and more. Like fellow engineer/musician Jim O’Rourke, Vettraino likes to find his way into ideas that are neither staying nor going. ‘Exercise’ opens with a deep breath of a drone, cracking the seal of a window as you take in the day’s first breeze. As the diaphragm of the drone rises and falls, the first of many lasting guitar structures on ‘Exercise’ cycles around a chiming piano. The piano motif embod-ies the nature of Vettraino’s process making ‘Exercise’; played and recorded during an idle moments at Jamdek Studios, it’s these usually inconsequential minutes, not redeemable for much more than a dead-eyed stare, that Vettraino has threaded into a cohesive musical drift.
Limited to 100 copies on tinted blue pro dubbed cassettes.