Pegg may be Pegg’s first album, but it’s far from Pegg mastermind Xander Duell’s first rodeo. Since providing backing vocals on a series of albums for his brother Damon McMahon’s Amen Dunes project, Duell has gone on to collaborate with artists including Modest Mouse and Weyes Blood—not to mention Fusilier, TEEN’s Teeny Lieberson, Buke & Gase’s Arone Dyer, psych-soul songwriter Jon Bap, and engineer Brandon Donald, who all contributed to Pegg. Oh, and Bartees Strange produced it.
In fact the record’s new single “Sweetheart” was the track that initially got Bartees all the way onboard with the project. “I met Xander in 2019 right before music became my main job,” he recalls. “When we reconnected at the River Church to make these records, his band didn’t have a name yet. Near the end of our sessions, Xander played me a voice memo demo of ‘Sweetheart’ and my immediate reaction was, ‘Whoa, you buried the lede!’ We tracked it just to get the idea down. The energies were fertile enough I ended up doing sessions with Teeny and Blake [Fusilier] in the months that followed Pegg’s, which I’m also excited for you to hear.”
The new track is a truly unique work of art-pop that sounds like a more carnivalesque take on Menomena throughout its brief two minutes, between its tough percussion, eerie sax, and frequently Danny Seim–esque vocals. The Lydia Garnett–directed music video manages to match that freak and then some, with drag queen Wet Mess starring as A Dentist I Would Not Trust. Check it out below.
