Portland, OR-based Blitzen Trapper today shares ”Requiem,” the fourth track unveiled from Holy Smokes Future Jokes out September 25 on Yep Roc Records. FLOOD premiered the track noting, “the group uses country music as a vessel for persistence through difficult times.”
On September 18, Holy Smokes Future Jokes will be released on limited edition red, yellow & blue splatter vinyl exclusively at local record stores, one week before the new September 25 official street date. Pre-order is now available.
Of the track, frontman/lyricst Eric Earley notes, “A song about enduring love and, though not entirely apparent, a song about the earth as it rolls, or maybe more generally life itself, its capacity to weather large scale extinctions and climate shifts. A weird kind of love song with culty vibes to the endurance of sentience above and beyond mankind.”
Led by existential questions about life and death, Holy Smokes Future Jokes finds Earley ruminating on the intermediate period between a person’s separate lives on earth, “and what it means to escape the cycle of birth and rebirth,” he explains.
Recorded at Long Play Recording in Portland, OR, Holy Smokes Future Jokes takes the listener on a wild and dramatic journey through the Bardo, that transitional state between death and rebirth. With an inherent otherworldliness in the lyrics and imagery, the album’s ten songs take inspiration from several works, notably George Saunders’ 2017 Lincoln in the Bardo, which led to Bardo Thodol, more commonly known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
“I became obsessed with it, “Earley notes. “All the ideas contained in that book were speaking to me in a lot of different ways. The main theme that kept drawing me in when I was writing was what I call ‘cosmic humility,’ he adds. “It’s the idea that humanity is not the center of the universe or even the center of our own universe here on earth. We’re not the most important thing.”
Throughout Holy Smokes Future Jokes, he addresses these concepts by homing in on deeply personal and profoundly affecting stories from the album’s hypnotic fingerpicked opener, “Baptismal,” which recounts an oft-told tale from high school days about a drunk driving accident, to the briskly-strummed closer “Hazy Morning” that focuses on mental health in the all-too-common American tragedy of school shootings.
The first track from the album, “Magical Thinking,” premiered at SPIN, who noted that it “features the delicate alt-folk that has become synonymous with the group.” The video for the second track “Masonic Temple Microdose #1,” premiered at Consequence of Sound. Read more about the Origins of “Masonic Temple Microdose #1.” Brooklyn Vegan premiered the video for the third track, “Dead Billie Jean,” noting “the title star of Michael Jackson’s 1983 hit — not to mention a few dead rock stars — into the heady psychedelic universe of this album.”
Produced and engineered by Raymond Richards, who also contributes upright bass/keys/pedal steel, Blitzen Trapper was joined in-studio by Michael Blake (keys), Luke Price (fiddle), Ben Latimer (saxophone), Heather Woods Broderick (backing vocals), and Haley Johnsen (backing vocals).
Over a 20-year career and ten full-length albums, Eric Earley has written, recorded and toured extensively as Blitzen Trapper, amassing a devoted fanbase and earning critical praise from a vast array of media that includes The New York Times, NPR Music, Rolling Stone Country, Paste, Pitchfork, SPIN, New York Magazine and Consequence of Sound.
Holy Smokes Future Jokes Tracklisting:
1. Baptismal
2. Bardo’s Light (Ouija, Ouija)
3. Don’t Let Me Run
4. Magical Thinking
5. Masonic Temple Microdose #1
6. Requiem
7. Holy Smokes Future Jokes
8. Sons and Unwed Mothers
9. Dead Billie Jean
10. Hazy Morning
