A Portrait Of An Ugly Man Remo Drive

• 1A Guide To Live By03:54
• 2Star Worship02:50
• 3Dead Man04:28
• 4If I've Ever Looked Too Deep In Thought03:28
• 5The Ugly Man Sings04:26
• 6True Romance Lives04:18
• 7Ode to Joy 203:46
• 8The Night I Kidnapped Remo Drive05:18
• 9A Flower and a Weed03:22
• 10Easy as That04:15
• Total Runtime40:05

Info zu A Portrait Of An Ugly Man

Remo Drive have revealed details of their highly awaited new album, A Portrait of an Ugly Man, which sees its release June 26 via Epitaph Records. With its acrobatic guitar work, deeply self-referential lyrics and off-the-walls energy, the album calls back to the dextrous, eccentric sound that helped the band – brothers Erik (vocals, guitar) and Stephen (bass) Paulson – explode into the underground with their 2017 debut.

Remo Drive sound larger than ever on the album’s hook-filled, indie rock anthem, “Star Worship”. The lead single preaches the need to eschew reverence for others and instead trust in yourself. It comes accompanied with a video which the brothers shot in their parents garage to keep busy during the ongoing quarantine.

A slice of tremolo-heavy classic rock filtered through the lens of the gunslinging American West, Remo Drive’s third album, A Portrait of an Ugly Man finds them truly in their element – both physically and sonically. Whereas the Paulsons filtered their buoyant songwriting through the concise lens of storytellers like Bruce Springsteen and The Killers on Natural, Everyday Degradation, A Portrait of an Ugly Man is more spontaneous, bolstered by the same charm and levity that made 2017’s Greatest Hits such an underground favorite.

Erik Paulson, vocals, guitar, keyboards, percussion
Stephen Paulson, bass, Midi programming
Sam Becht, drums
Whitney Smith, violin (on "If I've Ever Looked Too Deep In Thought")

Recorded and Mixed by Erik Paulson in our parent’s basement
Mastered by Greg Calbi at Sterling Sound
Produced by Erik Paulson

Remo Drive
have had a lot of time to think. Since releasing their debut album, GREATEST HITS, in 2017 (later re-released in 2018 by Epitaph Records), brothers Erik and Stephen Paulson have been pegged as one of the most captivating acts in the new-era indie rock scene, mixing the musicality of bands like Weezer, Title Fight, and The Police with the idiosyncratic lyrical tendencies of the genre’s more modern movement.

Greatest Hits, along with 2018’s POP MUSIC EP, took the band around the world with the likes of Saves The Day and Hippo Campus. All that time spent on toll roads and tarmacs left the brothers endless opportunities to think about how far their band had come in a short time – as well as plan for the future. “I spent a lot of time asking questions and looking inward,” Erik says. “It taught me a lot about who I was and who we wanted to be as a band.” Perhaps most importantly, this time to reflect showed Remo Drive what they didn’t want to do on their follow-up. While Greatest Hits overflowed with wide-eyed nativity and whole-hearted enthusiasm, NATURAL, EVERYDAY DEGRADATION (Epitaph) finds the Paulson brothers crafting a sturdier brand of indie-rock.

Produced by Joe Reinhart (Modern Baseball, Hop Along) and mixed by Peter Katis (The National, Interpol), Natural, Everyday Degradation doesn’t burn the Remo Drive playbook – it calibrates it to highlight the band’s true strengths. So Erik’s lyrics are still just as emotionally resonant and universally relatable as they were on Greatest Hits; here, though, they’re far more intentional and precise. Instead of letting off-kilter turns of phrase and nervous energy capture listeners’ ears, Remo Drive allow their confidence to take center stage. “Our first record was so much fun because it felt like we were breaking out of a box, mostly our local music scene,” Erik says. “But almost as soon as we did that, we started feeling constrained by where we found ourselves. We wanted to keep thinking outside the box and finding our own unique voice.”

Instead of digging back into their more obvious influences for LP2, the band (solely the Paulsons for the first time ever) spent time exploring albums from the likes of The Killers, Arcade Fire, and Bruce Springsteen – timeless artists who do more than just write songs: They tell stories, and this new way of approaching Remo Drive immediately made a mark on the songs the duo wrote. “If Brandon Flowers actually did the things he wrote about on the first Killers album, he’d be in prison,” Erik laughs. “You don’t have to always write about yourself. You can tap into your emotions and use them to tell stories instead.”

So while the first-person pronouns can’t always be traced back to the band directly this time, Natural, Everyday Degradation still deftly encapsulates the growing pains unrelegated to a specific generation, musing on topics like self-identify, mental health, and a burning desire to prove doubters wrong. “None of the songs are that wild,” Erik demures, noting the album’s title was in part inspired by Salvador Dalí’s iconic painting “The Persistence of Memory.” Perhaps that’s true, but while Remo Drive circa Greatest Hits found the band looking longingly beyond their suburban Minnesota hometown, Natural, Everyday Degradation is them on the other side, soundtracking the long drives and relentless touring with life’s bigger questions.

“There’s sadness in routine,” Erik says, referencing the song “Around The Sun,” an ode to touring. “Even in the happiest of situations, we’re losing valuable moments or time. All these songs are about some sort of warped existence, but through that, I think we ultimately find we can be whatever we want to be.”

Dieses Album enthält kein Booklet