"This band shows it can look back without being beholden to the past" All Music
"There's a muscle and rigor to the songwriting that you don't often hear from psych-rock bands today." Stereogum
"Atmospheric rock music veering between noise and subtlety -- so compelling ... a hopeful new chapter." Pitchfork
Los Angeles’s The Dream Syndicate is thrilled to announce These Times, their second album of new music since their 2012 reunion nearly thirty years after they first influenced California’s Paisely Underground scene. Watch mysterious creatures move through the psychedelic “Black Light” in the album’s first new song and video below.
PRE-ORDER THESE TIMES HERE
WATCH THE VIDEO TO BLACK LIGHT HERE
If 2017’s How Did I Find Myself Here was a 10 pm record, all swagger and cathartic explosion, then These Times is the 2 am sibling, moodier and more mercurial with the band acting as DJs of their own overnight radio station as the listener drifts off into dreams and wonders the next morning if any of it was real.
The Dream Syndicate recorded These Times once again at Montrose Studios in Richmond, Virginia. Co-produced by John Agnello (Phosphorescent, Waxahatchee, Hold Steady, Dinosaur Jr.), Wynn wrote all of the song’s lyrics in the studio after the band finished tracking, so that the words would be dictated by the sound rather than the other way around. This process contributed to the urgency of the album’s title.
“These Times. That’s it. It is all we’re talking about, all we’re thinking about. There is no avoiding the existential panic of a world that’s hurtling somewhere quickly, evolving, and shifting course by the hour. It seems like a lie to not address or reflect the things that we can’t stop thinking about—the whole world’s watching indeed. The lyrics are just a mirror of the dread, panic, mania, speculation, melancholy and ultimately shrugging abandonment that just might follow. It’s just all about where we are.”
The Dream Syndicate has a long and storied history. But where are they right now? They’re here. Right here. In These Times.
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