Font

Last month, Austin quintet Font — Thom Waddill (guitar/synth/vocals), Jack Owens (drums), Anthony Laurence (guitar/synth/sampler), Logan Wagner (percussion/sampler), and Roman Parnell (bass/synth) — announced their debut album, Strange Burden, out July 12th via Acrophase Records, and today share their latest single/video, 'Natalie’s Song.' Following the “nervy and elaborately constructed” (Stereogum) lead single 'Hey Kekulé,' album closer 'Natalie’s Song' opens with discordant and jangly guitars on top of almost-disco drum beats, fusing with an unrelenting vocal melody that creates something that looks to both the past and future of pop music. Over the last two years of performances, it’s become a crowd favourite, continuing to warp and refigure. The recorded version shows Font’s ability to exalt in a major key. Waddill’s lyrics, delivered as though the voice were another drum, holds the listener at bay while piece-by-piece building a track so hungry for release that its arrival feels like your own catharsis and no longer Font’s. “Release and respond”: this a central ethos for the band, an injunction for both themselves as musicians and for the listener.

The lyric video for the song, made by the band, shows the lyrics over two collages projected on handmade screens in a friend’s wood shop, hoping to materialize the language of the song. The collages were made with found footage, stock video, and iPhone footage, and was inspired by the work of Joan Jonas, Jenny Holzer, and Virginia Lee Montgomery.

Patchworked over years of improvising, playing, recording and re-recording both in studios and at home, Strange Burden is the fever-dream document of Font’s nascent stage. It translates the intensity of their live shows into the studio and polishes the surfaces of their music to juxtapose and dislocate genres with a quick-footed, nearly pop-art sensibility. Having built a reputation on the pure creativity and force of their live performances, the band rode this excitement to shows across the U.S., sharing bills with bar italia, Water From Your Eyes, Horsegirl, and CHAI, and landing a slot on the main stage at Austin City Limits. They’ve just wrapped a west coast tour supporting Yard Act and next head out for a co-headline run with Lifeguard before performing at Pitchfork London in November. View all dates here.

Font create driving music of sampled stabs, dance beats, and euphoric choruses. As drummers Owens and Wagner lock into a co-constructed groove, Parnell’s bass bridges the kinetic back line to multi-instrumentalist and environment-shaper Laurence. From this density emerge frontman Waddill’s associative lyrics and electric-shock dance. Discordant, sinister minimalism transforms into an anthemic chorus of pulsing synths; wall-of-sound guitars give way to a clubby 808 beat against which the drummers push and tug. To watch the band is to experience a tension of excess and containment as each member pulls the music into something that transcends its starting terms.