While the music that Bay Area rockers French Cassettes create often serves the purpose of maintaining a sense of balance in the lives of its members, this isn’t to say that the music itself always comes out totally serious. After writing about the Donner Party and Carolina Reapers in a track about a past relationship on the group’s 2020 LP Rolodex, they’re returning today with their third new single in three years ahead of a planned record set to arrive some time in 2024. “Probably one of the strangest songs we’ve ever written, but the only hiccup was when I told the band the name of the song and I remember there was a full three seconds of pause,” vocalist Lorenzo Scott Huerta shares of the new song, which is called “Medium Horny,” “Then we got to work.”
The track meanwhile takes a fairly earnest look at mental health while the instrumental takes the shape of a dreamy, acoustic-guitar-driven pop song—nothing short of a miracle considering the composition’s origins. “[It] started as just finger shapes I liked the look of on my guitar,” Huerta confesses. “But truth be told the inspiration is split into four of my favorite songwriters: The first verse is Johnny Marr, middle section is Jeff Lynne and Bill Evans, the outro is Elliott Smith. I’ve never heard a full Evans song in my life, I don’t think, but I’ve heard he does ‘chord solos’ and I loved that idea so I wrote a guitar solo of just strummed chords. When we recorded it, I tried to re-record the guitars, and our guitarist Mackenzie asked ‘Why?’ Which was a good point. So we just kept the demo guitars.”
Meanwhile the video for the track delves further into surrealism as director Syra McCarthy was given free reign to adapt a recurring childhood dream to complement the single. “From ages seven to 15 I had this recurring dream that this suave alien named Charles would fly down from the sky in a cool car, park in front of my house, and charm my neighbors and family into coming home with him, even offering me my favorite Tootsie Pop (cherry)—but I was never sold,” McCarthy explains. “Listening to ‘Medium Horny,’ the psychedelic sad-boy sway made me think of (yes) the literal meaning, but also, Charles. How easily we can feel so numb and unsatisfied on the day to day, and how easily someone like Charles could seduce us with ‘happiness’ capitalism.
“But hey, maybe we’d like it. Maybe there’d be a party. Maybe even swingers. Maybe ‘Medium Horny’ is just the beginning! Everybody gets off in space.”
Check out the video below. The band will also be embarking on an East Coast/Midwest tour next week before returning to the West Coast for a pair of dates to close out the year—find all of those stops here.
