After a four-year silence from his band Museum Mouth, Karl Kuehn returned to releasing music at the beginning of 2020 under the moniker Gay Meat, an outlet that began with a pair of bedroom-pop recordings shedding the garage-y overtones of his prior band. Yet with his forthcoming debut EP Bed of Every, Kuehn’s sights are a bit more maximal, with its first two singles blending that pop experimentalism with denser electric-guitar foundations.
The EP’s title track, which Kuehn is sharing today, takes a heavier turn both instrumentally and lyrically, with an evident dream pop influence kicking in to fill the space between minimal verses with controlled-yet-heavy fuzz. Meanwhile the lyrics look back on the period that immediately followed the passing of his mother in early 2021 when the grief of losing “the most important person in the world” to him triggered dissociative episodes. The lyrics, he notes, were written to spell out what was going on with him internally to his now-boyfriend following one of the bigger episodes.
“I found myself driving the 60-some odd miles from Southport, North Carolina to Myrtle Beach for no reason other than to feel close to a memory of her,” he explains. “To sort of relive it. To be close to it, and by extension feel close to her again. I had woken up in one of those dissociative clouds feeling absolutely not myself that morning and texted my now-boyfriend not to worry immediately once I realized what I was doing and why. By the time I got back home I just opened the car door and sort of rolled onto the driveway in complete mental and physical exhaustion, absolutely overwhelmed by the weight of what life had thrown at me. I started demoing the song that afternoon.”
Hear the track below, and pre-order Bed of Every here.
