On Friday, Spiral XP will release a new EP entitled Blue Earth via Danger Collective Records and Den Tapes. The EP marks the beginning of a new chapter for the Seattle four-piece, after two years of near radio silence from the band. Their return sees them with a new line up, adding TV Star’s Che Hise-Gattone (Guitar) and Bryan Coats (Vocals, Drums) to the band. It was a move that only felt natural after getting to know the two of them while working on 2024’s joint Spiral XP, TV Star EP, TVXP.
Last month the band shared the EP’s title track, which landed on Stereogum’s 5 Best Songs of The Week, and today the Seattle band are sharing a second single from the EP, a track called “Faith Electric” that arrives ahead of the EP’s Friday release.
The band say of the track:
Although this song sticks with the same beat and riff pretty much the whole way through, it is also a song that is distinctly divided in two. The first half features Max’s vocals vaguely evoking cult worship and blind faith, while the second half has Lena bringing us to a more ethereal place of dreams and half sleep. The juxtaposition of Max’s harsher and fiercer vocal delivery with Lena’s warm and lush singing is in line with the inspiration for the song, which was intended to be a combination of the grungy noise rock of Th’ Faith Healers with the dreamy trip hop of Bowery Electric.
The EP was produced with JooJoo Ashworth (SASAMI, Automatic, Dummy), who encouraged experimentation and a loose approach. “JooJoo is always down to be crazy and push our sound in new directions,” Coats says. “He knew all of these signal chains that he wanted to use and was being a madman. We would have already set up, and before we started playing a new song, he’d be like, ‘Wait, wait, wait’ and run around patching a bunch of new stuff in to give it a new sound.” The idea of throwing perfectionistic tendencies out the window for fun is one that echoed throughout the band. Farr-Morrissey would look at books to come up with lyrics to add to songs as they went, and Keyes brought unfinished songs into the studio to see what experimentation they could do with Ashworth to make them work.
“The EP is named after Blue Earth, Minnesota, which we’d visited while we were driving through on our first tour as Spiral and immediately after, we drove into this crazy tornado storm. We had to turn around in the eye of the storm and drive back to Blue Earth, where we took shelter in a gas station. It was a harrowing experience that brought us together,” Keyes says. “The tour itself already felt significant; we were playing shows together for the first time, and it was going well. Then to be caught in the storm and have this experience at the very end of the tour before the last show, which ended up being the best show of the tour, felt very significant for us,” Keyes says. “There was a point while we were caught in the storm where we were seriously like, ‘Are we gonna die?’”
Farr-Morrissey vividly recounts the experience through her lyrics on the album’s title track. “I wrote the Blue Earth lyrics in the van after the tornado; it was my way of processing what happened,” Farr-Morrissey says. There were no intentions for it to become a song until Hise-Gattone came to the studio with the riff. “It was this very vibrant, loud riff, and I was like, ‘This feels tornado-y, so maybe those go together’,” she says. Hise-Gattone’s loud guitar paired with Farr-Morrissey’s echoey lyrics twists the traumatic bonding experience into an uplifting track where curiosity of the uncertain blossoms.
Keep your mind open.
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[Thanks to Tom at Terrorbird Media.]
