Omar Akrouche and Nicole Rowe have been writing and recording together for six years now after connecting as staff engineers at John Vanderslice’s Oakland recording studio, Tiny Telephone. In that time, Worthitpurchase has released two albums that saw the duo honing each aspect of their craft, while in the time since Truthtelling’s 2022 release they’ve also expanded to the project to suit a live setting with a full backing band supporting them. And now, Akrouche and Rowe are gearing up to release the culmination of all of this creative development with their self-titled album, planned for an October 3 self-release. These 11 songs together mark their first cohesive body of work, which appropriately centers around the duo finally finding a sense of groundedness in a world that’s increasingly becoming anything but that.
The second single they’re sharing from the record, “Sideway,” proves that Worthitpurchase aren’t burying their heads in the sand with that newfound sense of comfort. “I think this song is a rejection of the normalized absurdity of the world,” Akrouche shares. “It’s about running up against the world and the structures that we live within—why things are the way they are—and not being able to fully understand the mechanisms of our world.”
In the lineage of their former employer Vanderslice, “Sideways” is a lo-fi acoustic-folk track at its core with a flurry of electronic glitching, samples, and other disorienting flourishes serving to remove it from any easy classification. Check out the video for the track below created by Jakob Longcob and Jake Wolfert, which features a series of interesting visual rhymes that emphasize a sense of scale, and pre-order Worthitpurchase here.
