Weeping Icon Announce Ocelli EP, Share New Track & Video !
It's been nearly three years since Weeping Icon's thrilling self-titled debut was released on Fire Talk in 2019. A band who had long been bubbling under in the Brooklyn scene, their album was met with an immediate wave of excitement, with Bandcamp dubbing the record "rock music at it's most vital" and Pitchfork hailing it as "a complete vision", praising the collection of "noisy punk thrashers that are clever, incisive, and frequently very funny."
Today, Weeping Icon have returned to share their first new music since their 2019 debut, and announce their new Ocelli EP (due out November 18th on Fire Talk) with the excellently-titled single "Pigs, Shit & Trash".
Recorded and mixed by Ben Greenberg at Strange Weather before being mastered by Sarah Register (Pom Pom Squad, US Girls, Julien Baker), the new EP sees the band fine-tune their acerbic songwriting and propulsive rhythm section while also galvanizing into shoegazey noise to captivating effect. Lead single “Pigs, Shit, & Trash” accelerates Weeping Icon’s doomscape tendencies into heady rhythmic territory, with reverb-heavy vocals providing a new dimension to one of the more ferocious tracks in the band's catalog to date.
"This song was written in the summer of 2020, at the height of the pandemic," explains Sara Fantry. "I was in NYC, where I was born and raised, and where my family still lives. As I watched transplants sneak away to their isolated farms or country houses, I was trapped in a crowded 4 bedroom apartment. Surrounded by death, I was confused, terrified for my aging parents’ health, and looking for any semblance of hope that things could turn around. Around that same time, uprisings and protests for Black Lives Matter were happening every day in NYC – I had good friends who were beaten by police officers and jailed for standing up for what was right. It became blatantly obvious that the government simply wasn't working for the people and had no clue how to help. These government officials just feel so untouchable – like we can meme them and make jokes about them but at the end of the day, they get to go home to their wives and million dollar mansions and live in their own bubble, not be bothered by the troubles of the world that they created.
"When the electoral debates came around, I thought it was very fitting that a fly landed on top of Mike Pence’s head, right when he was talking some bullshit about race in America. I loved that moment, that this fly just randomly shat and vomited on this guy's head (as flies are known to do to everything they land on). I started imagining this fly as some kind of antihero, claiming one tiny bit of revenge on national TV – a heroic villain attracted to pigs, shit, and trash."