Mad pop genius J. Mamana has shared the single “New America” ahead of his forthcoming album For Every Set of Eyes, which is set to arrive on August 23 via Holy Family. The track is an epic of uniquely American proportions, with Mamana tapping into the orchestral-experimentation-meets-sweet-indie-pop pipeline that can be traced back to the early days of Dirty Projectors and peak Joanna Newsom. Thematically, the song deals with the history of media and how the stories we’re told force worldviews or alienate us from the reality they create.
“‘New America’ started as a response to the whole TV thing—the golden age of TV, prestige miniseries, critically acclaimed sitcoms,” Mamana shares. “I watch it myself. I think the entertainment bug is something worth looking at. In my case, I was reading about D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, how he built this massive Babylon set in East Hollywood and staged the Old Testament scene of Belshazzar’s feast, the king who saw the ‘writing on the wall’: ‘You have been weighed on the scales and found wanting.’
“It’s nothing special to be dubious about American entertainment,” he continues, “but I felt that the messages we receive, and the way they’re propagated, is a bit vexing. Our best dissidents are ridiculed, so that every critique is thinly veiled, every act of protest is done on the sly, and everyone unsettled by the whole charade is also party to it. But hey, it’s good stuff. Like a famous entertainer once said, ‘The Coca-Cola company is not happy with me—that's OK, I’ll still keep drinking that garbage.’”
Check out the video for “New America” below, and pre-order For Every Set of Eyes here.
