Recorded in her home studio with her husband and longtime creative partner Buddy Hughen, Unpopular Music showcases a striking intimacy and cohesion, with the two tracking most of the instruments themselves. On Unpopular Music, Tristen also welcomes guest appearances from Wilco’s Pat Sansone, Vanessa Carlton, Natalie Prass, Becca Mancari, and Erin Rae. 

Tristen shares the first sounds from Unpopular Music with lead single ‘Skin of Our Teeth’, an ode to allowing dreams to change and calming the fiery furnace of ambition.

Playfully self-described as “refining unpopularity since 1982,” Tristen embraces eccentricity and independence of thought as core artistic values: “I love unpopular music. Abstractions sung through unpopular melodies, wrapped in warm sounds. I love unpopular themes that stir difficult emotions and ambivalence… may your unpopularity be your badge of knowingness.”

Unpopular Music:

1. Because Your Love is Mine
2. Hey La
3. Skin of Our Teeth
4. Rose and Thorn
5. Mona Lisa
6. Let Go
7. Bully
8. Selkie Woman
9. Know By Heart
10. Winter Strangler

The post Tristen announces new album Unpopular Music; shares first song/video ‘Skin Of Our Teeth’ appeared first on She Makes Music.

The intimate debut LP gracefully captures the contraction, expansion and release of an intense period of emotional repair, in soft-edged, radiating indie rock. Inspired by a breakup and subsequent healing process, patching is a sonic journey as much as an emotional one. Whether it be longing for friendship, social anxiety, hypochondria spirals, or coming home to a box of stuff from your ex, the album oscillates from rumination to little glimmers of joy to closure and eventually, falling in love all over again.

Together with collaborator, instrumentalist and girlfriend Noa Francis, runo and her co-producer Lutalo recorded the album in a cabin in rural Vermont over the course of two weeks. Centering the honeyed, time-worn timbre of a centenarian acoustic guitar and the easeful warmth of runo’s voice, the trio began putting together the pieces one by one. “It was just flowing,” runo says. “Every song is an emotional fragment during my healing process patched together into one project, while I was also patching myself together in real time. You can feel the damage, but also the repair. The slowing down in order to move forward, and the dreaming of a time where I’m finally free from the dread.”

To mark today’s announcement, runo is sharing the album’s lead single ‘Sickness’. Buoyed by a conversational, propulsive melody, album opener ‘Sickness’ deals in unhealthy cycles and mundanity. Underbellied by anxiety, it soars and sears, piecing day to day tableaus together with runo’s knack for introspection.

runo says of the track: “This song could be taken in many ways, literally or metaphorically. It’s about falling ill of many kinds, the common cold, perhaps lovesickness, but whatever it may be: you heal through it. This was the first song we worked on, and it came together really seamlessly.”

patching:

1. Sickness
2. Lemon Garland
3. Alley Cat
4. Halfway Up The Lawn
5. Be Gentle With Me
6. Elephant
7. Locket
8. Pond
9. Gathering The Pieces
10. The Quiet One
11. Darkness
12. Outro (Angel)

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