After serving as one half of the dissonant Brooklyn noise-rock duo Talk Normal a decade ago, Andrya Ambro has since set out on her own to pursue the no wave repetition and seedy post-punk of that project under the moniker Gold Dime with the release of her debut album Nerves back in 2017. Following 2019’s follow-up My House, Ambro is back with news of her third LP No More Blue Skies, which is slated for release on October 20 via No Gold.
Picking up right where the other recordings left off, the album’s first single “Wasted Wanted” presents the unnerving sounds of no wave’s droning guitars and pounding percussion (a timpani, in this case) and its eerie unpredictability while incorporating peppy handclaps and Ambro’s familiar soaring vocals narrating the song’s “no-nonsense” approach, as she puts it, to “[navigating] a world of surface behavior.
She continues, “I took inspiration from Italian avant garde composer Egisto Macchi’s ‘Gli Imboscati,’ whose use of minimal repetitive drums act as both a guiding light and menacing reality. With that as the starting point, the guitars, like a broken machine, fill out the rhythm with moments of triumph. The vocal stylings of Annie Lennox in the Eurhythmics’ ‘4/4 in Leather’ definitely found their way into the subconsciousness of this song—those vocals being an amalgamation of something sincere and urgent, but somehow still laugh in the face of this insufficient reality.”
Paired with the track is a black-and-white music video that’s equally cryptic in its imagery as well as its methods of presenting that imagery. “The kernel of the idea for this video came from a camera movement that features prominently in Godard’s Contempt,” shares director/DP/editor Joe Wakeman, “this slow pan between a couple on opposite sides of the room having a tense conversation, where the actual space between them is treated like a third interlocutor—and also from these wind-up Godzilla toys I had as a kid. The latter reminded me of the song’s sound and movement. Inspired by a Mike Kelley piece, Andrya introduced the concept of the dancers, as well as the timpani. And when you force all these things to fit together, it creates this visual cacophony that weirdly arrives at making some kind of unconscious sense.”
Check out the video below, and pre-order No More Blue Skies here.
