Weeping Icon Share New Track "Two Ways", New EP "Ocelli" out Friday !
Last month, Weeping Icon returned after a nearly three year absence to announce their Ocelli EP (out this Friday on Fire Talk). The EP was announced with a single called "Pigs, Shit & Trash", their first new music since the 2019 release of their thrilling self-titled debut, which generated considerable excitement, earning praise from outlets like FADER, Stereogum, FLOOD, BrooklynVegan and Revolver, who made comparison to Sonic Youth while describing the track as "so sick".
Today, Weeping Icon are sharing a second track from the three track EP ahead of its Friday release, a single entitled "Two Ways."
"'Two Ways' is about people who want to appear virtuous in their public facing personality, but live a contradictory shadow life in which they do whatever they please, no matter how harmful their actions are to others," explains Sara Fantry. "It’s told through the voice of a man named Todd (yes, that’s his real name!) who I encountered a few years back. He used a harmful term towards a woman he was angry with, then accepted a long explanatory talk from me, appeared to reflect, enthusiastically told me he’d appreciated me taking the time to educate him and agreed to change his behavior, and then immediately found that same woman and started calling her harmful sexist names without a moment between. I was truly in shock at how comfortable he was with his personality being stratified into two layers - the outward-facing kind, modern man, looking to learn from the necessarily rapid changes in society - and the sinister, selfish sadist beneath who believes in his own entitlement to act with impunity."
"The video we made (directed by Rafeal Joson & Mike Andretti, all editing and effects by MikeVideopunk) explores the stratified personality of the daytime talkshow host, who wants to appear kind, empathetic and sincere to his viewers, while goading his guests into salacious fights for his own profit, regardless of the personal and public damage done to those guests. With some humor in there, we hope to hold a conversation around the shadow of nefarious intent that lurks below so many supposedly ethical personalities in our world."
To mark the release of the EP the band will be playing at Alphaville this Friday, November 18th. Tickets can be purchased here.
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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."
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.
Listening to Weeping Icon’s debut album is to enter a dim catacomb of psychical catharsis. Urgent yet calculated riffs rip through a thunderous pummel of percussion, an anomalous blend of punk and psychedelic drumming carries the songs with an atmosphere of organized chaos.. Lyrically they are both serious and sarcastic, trading off vocalists to confront issues central to a generation, dosing listeners with a controlled sense of horror and humor like flavors in a dish.The band’s debut record “Weeping Icon” is a collection of 7 songs that archive the metamorphosis into heavier and more provocative territories. In keeping with their live performance, a sequence of dystopian sound interludes complete the album, serving as guided meditations between the candid subversive fury of the main tracks. Recorded and mixed by Uniform's Ben Greenberg and mastered by Jonathan Schenke in New York City.