The Velveteers have shared their new full-length album A Million Knives via Easy Eye Sound. The Colorado trio – featuring tour-de-force frontwoman Demi Demitro backed by dual drummers Baby Pottersmith and Jonny Fig – use vintage disco grooves and spellbinding falsettos to pursue rock n’ roll’s non-binary, queer and female-fronted future.
The thirteen-song collection was penned by The Velveteers after a particularly grueling stretch of life on the road – while navigating the typically-unspoken tolls of an industry that can be far from compassionate. A Million Knives follows The Velveteers’ 2021 debut album Nightmare Daydream, which quickly found them playing stadium stages with Smashing Pumpkins, Guns N’ Roses and more. The trio are currently bringing the new album to their live shows across the Western US for the first time.
We asked frontwoman Demi to do an in depth track by track breakdown of A Million Knives for us. Read it below.
All These Little Things
This is one of my all time favorite riffs to play. I wrote the riff after a terrible breakup when I was 19 and the riff stayed with me all these years but I never had any lyrics for it. One day the lyrics just came to me and it definitely felt like I was holding in all these feelings from when I was 19. It was like collaborating with past versions of myself in certain ways and finally putting into words what a painful situation it was.
Suck The Cherry
I wrote ‘Suck The Cherry’ on a hot summer’s day when I was locked away in a cabin in Paonia, CO. All I had with me for entertainment was my guitar, a notebook, a little drum machine and some cherries I had picked up earlier that day from the farmers market. I was messing around on the drum machine and found this beat that ended up influencing the entire song. It had this pop, dance-y feel but at the same time, punk attitude. It had this chorus that was just so fun to sing and it would always get stuck in my head.
See Your Face
This song is about seeing somebody you really don’t wanna see. We tracked this in one take. For this song and many others on the album I went direct-in for my guitar instead of through an amp to get more of a crunchy tone.
Bound In Leather
‘Bound In Leather’ to me feels like looking through a kaleidoscope. I absolutely love this song. We wrote this song with Greg Cartwright (The Oblivians) and Dan Auerbach in Nashville. I came into the studio with this guitar riff and we just flowed with it from there. I loved how the song had such a dancey feel. When we started coming up with the lyrics, I was singing and Dan kept telling me to sing higher and higher. Singing falsetto is something I don’t normally do but it just felt really right for the song. That was a moment where Dan pushed me to do something I hadn’t done before or maybe wouldn’t have ever thought of. I even ended up singing falsetto on a couple other songs too. I hope everybody loves dancing to this song as much as I do.
On and On
‘On and On’ is another really dancey track. We wanted to make sure the song was super heavy but also wanted to take some inspiration from more pop artists like Lady Gaga. It has some drum machines on it, which was something we had been really wanting to incorporate into our sound. Nick Bockrath from Cage The Elephant made a guest appearance on this song with some spacey background guitar sounds.
Sweet Little Hearts
This song feels like the heart of the album to me. This was actually the first song I wrote for the album and it instantly set the stage of what I wanted to talk about and how I was feeling. We all come into the world so pure and as life progresses we all become jaded in one way or another. It’s about grieving your childhood and realizing no matter how hard you try to protect yourself- your heart is gonna break and there’s nothing you can really do about that. It’s a call to nurture your inner child because the world sure isn’t going to do it for you.
A Million Knives
When we recorded the album we went in with around 25 songs. We didn’t have enough time to record everything. ‘A Million Knives’ was one of those songs that didn’t get recorded. We left Nashville super excited about everything we tracked but then we got our initial mixes back a couple months later and we felt like something was missing. We took a trip to Nashville to finish up some mixing and on a whim ended up recording ‘A Million Knives,’ probably in about an hour or less. This song is about the pain of loving something so much that it hurts. I’d do anything for music and art but how much am I willing to put myself through? If you listen close enough you can hear my real heartbeat on this song.
Moonchild
We came into the studio with multiple songs over 5 minutes and Dan definitely thought we were insane for that haha. This was the 5 minute song that actually made the cut though. I love playing this song and if you’ve come to any of our live shows chances are you’ve probably heard it before. It was fun to finally hear this captured in a studio recording.
Take it from The Top
This song was written from more of an imagined perspective and very much inspired by the glam of Hollywood. Inspired by someone who desperately wants to be somebody. Desperately wants to be liked and loved but in turn is lonely in their pursuits of success. Baby wrote almost all the synth and keyboard parts on this album, but the synth on this chorus is one of my favorites!
Go Fly Away
The Black Keys came into the studio one day and had this keyboard sample that we just worked off of. It was one of those songs that came to us. As far as the inspiration behind it, it just all came at once. I think a lot of it had to do with just wanting to run away. That’s where my head space was when I wrote it was just wanting to run away and get away from everything.
Up Here
‘Up Here’ is a song about reclaiming your power and letting go. Towards the end of the album I feel like there is a lot of cathartic release. “the world at my feet, and the stars in my palms” felt symbolic and powerful. It was something I needed to be reminded of. For production we drenched the song with reverb to really give it a dreamy feel and we had Nick Bockrath from Cage The Elephant add some lap steel to tie it together.
Heaven
Heaven is all about the drama. This song took many forms and it was just a couple days before we arrived in Nashville to record that it finally felt right. Baby and I will stop at nothing and often times drive ourselves crazy if we believe in something and this song always felt important and magical to us.
Fix Me
A few days before we left to record Baby was going through demos I had sent earlier in the year and ‘Fix Me’ just felt like it was calling out to us. The choruses on this song are so big and epic, it felt like the perfect way to end the album. You’ll hear throughout the album what I call the “A Million Knives” theme which happens in the chorus of ‘Fix Me’ and also in ‘A Million Knives’. The album is dedicated to my grandmother, Marjorie Lu. In the very beginning and end of ‘Fix Me,’ the music box you hear playing was hers.
