Of all the careers recounted in Lizzy Goodman’s recent early-aughts indie rock tell-all Meet Me in the Bathroom, anti-folk heroes The Moldy Peaches may take the cake for most fascinating career trajectory. While their self-titled debut was quick to receive a cult status hardly matched by The Strokes, Interpol, and other game-changing rock acts in their peer group, the duo of Adam Green and Kimya Dawson didn’t quite reach national attention until Michael Cera and Ellen Page covered one of their tracks in an Oscar-winning film.
Since then, Dawson made waves when she put out an album with the impossibly wordy emcee Aesop Rock, while Green’s biggest head-scratching accomplishment has been the Kickstarted feature film Adam Green’s Aladdin. With the first new music since his own soundtrack to the 2016 Gondry-esque 3D-printer fantasy, Green is announcing Engine of Paradise today, which will be rolled out with a thematically tied-in graphic novel, a “psychedelic war epic” entitled War and Paradise. Of this new campaign, “Freeze My Love” is the first preview.
As exuberantly maudlin as ever, the track is further brightened by a behind-the-scenes video shoot on a papier-mâché set recalling that of Aladdin. As Green traverses the project in a painter’s coverall, his friends assemble some sort of mystic pizza jungle.
“‘Freeze My Love’ is like a road trip song where your Corvette is a JPG filled with flesh cruising toward a blockchain horizon,” Green says with characteristic opacity. “I think it’s a pretty song. I wish there was a radio station that played it continuously.”
Giving some context for the video, Green continues: “I filmed this video while constructing a huge papier-mâché ‘Pizza Beach’ installation for The Museum of Pizza in Brooklyn. A lot of the statues we built are characters from my upcoming graphic novel War and Paradise—the Rabbi of Regular Town and the bathers that purify their souls in sex-therapy sessions on the beaches of paradise.”
Engine of Paradise is out September 6 on Danger Mouse’s 30th Century Records, with War and Paradise dropping the same day. If you’re in New York, you can catch his album release show at Rough Trade before he heads off on a European tour.
TOUR DATES
9/6/19 – Rough Trade – Brooklyn, NY
10/18/19 – CCA – Glasgow, UK
10/19/19 – Soup Kitchen – Manchester, UK
10/20/19 – Thekla – Bristol, UK
10/22/19 – EartH – London, UK
10/24/19 – Vooruit – Ghent, BE
10/25/19 – Gaite Lyrique – Paris, FR
10/26/19 – Melkweg (Upstairs) – Amsterdam, NL
10/28/19 – Stage Club – Hamburg, Germany
10/29/19 – BiNuu – Berlin, Germany
10/31/19 – Palace – St. Gallen, Germany
11/1/19 – Sommercasino – Basel, Switzerland
11/2/19 – La Romandie – Lausanne, Switzerland
11/3/19 – Papiersaal – Zurich, Switzerland
11/5/19 – Flex Halle – Vienna, Austria
