Rubblebucket, the art-pop duo of Kalmia Traver and Alex Toth, have announced that their new album Year of the Banana is on its way. The new project will arrive on October 18, and first single “Moving Without Touching” is here today. The bouncy, propulsive cut features lead vocals from Traver, who laments a separation: “My heart is beating, why can’t it be with you?” Despite the distance between Traver and her unnamed partner, the chorus shimmers and shines with a sticky-sweet melody and drums that keep the pace moving, moving, moving.
The song was inspired by a poem called “Biking on Broadway” that was written by Traver in 2015 and published in a zine called Year of the Banana a year later. “It’s the amazing and deadly obstacle course that is riding a bike in New York City,” explains Toth, referring to the poem’s title. “Everyone and everything in this concrete jungle is aggressively interweaving and dodging one another without touching. It’s a delicate and beautiful natural balance that doesn’t always work out. But sometimes it does and, in a way, maintaining a friendship and the collaboration of Rubblebucket post-breakup has been like that. This song and also this album is a study in and homage to that delicate dance.”
Traver adds: “The seed for this song was a sense of loneliness but also refuge in one’s inner landscape in the midst of a world that’s moving really fast and becoming more and more divided, turbulent, and complex every day. The yearning to be closer, even as it seems we’re moving farther apart—adrift, little islands, scraps of life on an ocean of time-space continuum warped by pandemic, uprising, war, societal transformation. I yearn for new kinds of intimacy in my life, and part of yearning is ‘not having it yet.’ That’s where this song starts for me, and I’m here for the journey on which the yearning will, undoubtedly, keep taking us.”
Check out the video for the track below, and pre-order Year of the Banana here.
