NYC-via-Philly quartet Strange Ranger are amidst “their metamorphosis from indie rock to experimental electronic pop, keeping one foot in each genre with stirring, fascinating results” (Stereogum). Next month, the indie veterans will release their new album, Pure Music, out July 21st on Fire Talk, and today present its new single, “Way Out,” with an accompanying visualizer by Fiona Woodman. A Talk Talk-inspired paean to isolation, “Way Out” features a striking saxophone solo from the band’s own Nathan Tucker, and continues Strange Ranger’s occupation of a space best described as uncanny. On Pure Music, the band indulges an obsession with Loveless, but they infiltrate any comparison to shoegaze with overtures to disco, house and experimental pop. “Way Out” continues along an electric trail of singles — the “cinematic” (MTV) “She’s On Fire” and the “striking” (Paste) “Rain So Hard” — proving once again that Strange Ranger are “one of the most compelling rock bands in America” (NME).
Of “Way Out,” bandleader Isaac Eiger says: “I wrote this one while going through my memories of being a teenager in Montana and then it got all biblical for some reason. We produced it at the house in the woods and I remember feeling extremely alert, almost manic working on it late at night. At the time, we thought of it as a sort of condensed Talk Talk song, but I’m not sure if it ended up that way.”
Tomorrow, Strange Ranger will perform in Philadelphia alongside fellow experimental pop pioneers Water From Your Eyes, followed by a hometown NYC show at 4 Irving Ave with Chanel Beads. In conjunction, the band will perform a pair of Pure Music release shows on August 4th at DROM in New York and August 5th at Johnny Brenda’s in Philadelphia.
WATCH STRANGE RANGER’S “WAY OUT” VISUALIZER
Ever since Stranger Ranger hit the house show circuit many years ago, Eiger has returned to a Burial quote from one of his few recorded interviews: “Being on your own listening to headphones is not a million miles away from being in a club surrounded by people. Sometimes you get that feeling like a ghost touched your heart, like someone walks with you.” Though that Burial quote resonates, the songs that make up Pure Music have a pulse so strong they’re practically breathing; not touching your heart, but gripping it. Pure Music is easily the band’s most exciting and ambitious work to date.
Eiger, Tucker, Woodman and Fred Nixon recorded Pure Music at a cabin in upstate New York as a blizzard raged outside. The album elucidates the promise of No Light in Heaven, their 2020 mixtape that hinted the band was cocooned in a state of near total transformation. Pure Music emerged from the same sessions, and while No Light in Heaven resembles, in places, bygone iterations of Strange Ranger’s sound, Pure Music was made with so little concern for what anyone might expect of them, as if they were a band without history. It's an album that feels out of this time, one that lives in a dimension running parallel to ours.
Pure Music embodies that manic state through interstitial interludes laced with YouTube samples that connect each track to the next so as to submerge the listener in its world, one that rewards catharsis. “Music makes us transcend the feeling of being alienated from or trapped by the world,” Woodman says. “I want the experience of listening to Pure Music to be euphoric.”