The Dream Syndicate slates new album for May

Exciting news. I loved seeing the band live with Matthew Sweet in LA last year. And what an interesting cover (I just couldn't shrink the size for this post)...

Los Angeles’s The Dream Syndicate's These Times, due May 3 via Anti- Records, is their second album of new music since a 2012 reunion nearly thirty years after they first influenced California’s Paisley Underground scene.

Watch mysterious creatures move through the psychedelic “Black Light” in the album’s first new song and video HERE.

“When I was writing the songs for the new album I was pretty obsessed with Donuts by J-Dilla,” lead singer and songwriter Steve Wynn explained. “I loved the way that he approached record making as a DJ, a crate-digger, a music fan wanting to lay out all of his favorite music, twist and turn the results until he made them into his own. I was messing around with step sequencers, drum machines, loops—anything to take me out of my usual way of writing and try to feel as though I was working on a compilation rather than ‘more of the same’. You might not automatically put The Dream Syndicate and J-Dilla in the same sentence, but I hear that album when I hear our new one.”

The Dream Syndicate recorded These Times once again at Montrose Studios in Richmond, Virginia. Co-produced by John Agnello (Phosphorescent, Hold Steady, Dinosaur Jr.), Wynn wrote all of the song’s lyrics in the studio after the band finished tracking, so that the words would be dictated by the sound rather than the other way around. This process contributed to the urgency of the album’s title.

“These Times. That’s it. It is all we’re talking about, all we’re thinking about. There is no avoiding the existential panic of a world that’s hurtling somewhere quickly, evolving, and shifting course by the hour. It seems like a lie to not address or reflect the things that we can’t stop thinking about—the whole world’s watching indeed. The lyrics are just a mirror of the dread, panic, mania, speculation, melancholy and ultimately shrugging abandonment that just might follow. It’s just all about where we are.”

Tour dates:

5/10 – Washington DC – U Street Music Hall
5/11 – Sellersville, PA – Sellersville Theater
5/16 – New York, NY – Mercury Lounge
5/17 – New York, NY – Mercury Lounge
5/18 – Somerville, MA – Once
5/30 – Milwaukee, WI – Collectivo
6/1 – Chicago, IL – The Hide Out