On Friday, Providence’s Deer Tick will release their new album ‘Coin-O-Matic‘ (ATO). The LP’s eleven tracks shine a light on a lesser-known side of the American story: the hidden histories of the band’s home state of Rhode Island, where the struggles of working-class families have long existed alongside the shadow of the mafia underworld. Drawn to that uneasy intersection, singer/guitarist John McCauley, guitarist/singer Ian O’Neil, drummer/singer Dennis Ryan, and bassist Christopher Ryan crafted a collection of songs steeped in desperation, grief, redemption, and resilience, rendered with both cinematic scope and lived-in emotional depth. A striking new chapter from one of indie rock’s most enduring bands, Coin-O-Matic unfolds as a complex love letter to a way of life slowly slipping from the collective memory.
Today they share the final single ahead of the release, Coin-O-Matic opener ‘Dog Years‘, a quietly devastating song that begins in folky intimacy before building to a sorrowful catharsis. In dreaming up the storyline, McCauley looked back on an assisted-living facility near his childhood home, where his own grandfather spent the final years of his life. “The main character of ‘Dog Years’ is based on the guys I used to watch playing chess outside that building or hanging out at the bus stop, smoking cigarettes and shooting the shit,” says McCauley. “I imagined an older gentleman losing his partner and that loss accelerating his aging—almost like he was doing seven years of damage with every passing year.”
LISTEN TO ‘DOG YEARS’ HERE
WATCH ‘DOG YEARS’ LIVE AT BIG NICE STUDIO HERE
The band have previously shared ‘Everything Born‘, which touches on the LP’s underlying theme of impermanence, the ramshackle jangle-pop ‘Mary Singletary‘ and ‘ACI‘, a song graced with all the grit and warmth of a classic rock anthem.
The follow-up to Emotional Contracts (hailed by Uncut as one of 2023’s best albums), Coin-O-Matic takes its title from a cigarette-vending-machine company that served as the headquarters of Raymond Patriarca—a legendary mobster who ran one of the most ruthless crime families in U.S. history. “If you grew up in Rhode Island years ago, you’d see all these mobsters on the news and then run into them at a restaurant on Federal Hill,” says McCauley, referring to Providence’s version of Little Italy. “They were criminals but also very colorful characters, and I wanted the album to partly reflect a certain nostalgia for that kind of seediness.”
Recorded at Deer Tick’s home studio, Coin-O-Matic marks their first self-produced album in their two-decade-plus career and features guest musicians such as Los Lobos’ Steve Berlin (on baritone saxophone) and former Deer Tick member Rob Crowell (on organ). The album frequently brings a live-wire immediacy to their finespun storytelling. “We’ve never been so comfortable making a record, and I think you can feel that in the performances,” says Dennis, who engineered the LP. “We weren’t beholden to anyone else’s idea of what Deer Tick sounds like, and because of that, this album feels like an unfettered capturing of who we are as a band.”
In its soulful contemplation of recklessness and consequence, longing and devotion, Coin-O-Matic ultimately joins the canon of rock albums whose geographically rooted storytelling reveals deeper truths about the human experience. “I think there’s something universal in stories of regret and loss and poor decisions, even if they’re told through the lens of all the odd characters in this little state of ours,” O’Neil points out. “One of the reasons I wanted us to make this album is that I think Rhode Island deserves to be a contender for a place that people sing about,” McCauley adds. “Sonically, there’s nothing country about it, but to me it almost feels like a country record set in an urban environment—there’s definitely some outlaws in there. I hope that people see themselves in it, and that they understand a little more about the place that we come from.”
‘COIN-O-MATIC’ TRACKLISTING
1. Dog Years
2. Mary Singletary
3. Endless Loop
4. Sweetest Thing
5. ACI
6. Everything Born
7. Eyelid
8. I Am an Island
9. 507 Smith
10. Exit Door
11. Candy Cigarettes
WATCH ‘MARY SINGLETARY’ VIDEO HERE
WATCH ‘EVERYTHING BORN’ VIDEO HERE
WATCH ‘ACI’ VIDEO HERE
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PRE-ORDER ‘COIN-O-MATIC’ HERE
