There are few bands named after an animal/bird who are actually better than the animal/bird themselves (Owl City anyone?) but Fruit Bats are one such band, and they’ve just announced details of their new album ‘Gold Past Life’ which will be their debut full-length for Merge, due June 21st. You can hear the first single and album opener ‘The Bottom Of It’ below, which primary Fruit Bat Eric D. Johnson describes as “a song about simple victories, told a little bit through the notion of finding strange and fortuitous totems (round stones, turkey feathers, dead deer) and keeping them as trophies.”
The new album marks both an end and a beginning. It’s the end of an unintentional thematic trilogy of records that began with 2014’s ‘EDJ’ (a solo record by name, but a Fruit Bats release in spirit) and concluded with 2016’s ‘Absolute Loser’. They encompassed years of loss, displacement, and the persistent, low-level anxiety of the current political climate. They were written in the wake of friends who left these earthly confines and families that could have been. “I wrote music to comfort myself,” says Johnson of those times. “It was a soothing balm.”
