Just over a year removed from the release of Frances Chang’s debut album Support Your Local Nihilist, the Brooklyn-based songwriter has returned with news of her follow-up release Psychedelic Anxiety—that record’s “psychic twin,” per its press materials. The new album promises a stronger focus on storytelling than on the immediacy of the slowcore-by-way-of-lo-fi-punk sounds of Chang’s debut as it prods deep existential questions through sprawling and thrillingly proggy art-rock opuses.
The first such opus arrives today in the form of “Eye Land,” an instrumental journey paying homage to both Joni Mitchell’s Hejira and Deerhoof as Chang’s lyrical tapestry feels equally elaborately woven. As she shares, “This song marked a period of change—a big relationship was ending, I was solo touring with my friend around the Ireland and England freak-folk/witch-noise scene, I was completely creatively and romantically blocked and two separate strangers told me in two separate countries that my second chakra was blocked. I wrote this song on my last day in Ireland, but edited it over a period of many years, and finally finished writing it in the studio days before recording. Maybe that’s why it’s so schizophrenic and ever-changing—it tells a long and winding story.”
The track also comes with a fantastical music video created from drawings by Chang and Robert Calzone based on the latter’s storyboard—check it out below, and pre-order the record here.
