For nearly five years, the Chicago duo of Maria Reichstadt and John Regan have been releasing haunted synthpop tracks under the name clubdrugs, with the latest single arriving last Valentine’s Day in the guise of the blown-out industrial single “Sour Times.” Yet their newly announced debut album Lovesick makes a clean break from the small discography they’ve amassed over the years, with its eight-song track list free of any of the material they’ve put out to date. Instead, the self-produced collection is being introduced today with its second track, “Heart 2 Break,” which feels a bit like the dark club sounds and throaty whispers that have bookended Ladytron’s career.
“‘Heart 2 Break’ is about the desire to hurt an indifferent person who’s hurt you,” Reichstadt shares of the track. “I wanted to express how totally frustrating that is. You bang your head against the wall trying to get any kind of remorse out of them. In the end, you only hurt yourself.” As for the recording, she adds that this is the first track the band has recorded and released fully independently, even opting to create their own studio space rather than renting a room. “We built a vocal booth in the closet and we tracked everything in our home studio. It was great because instead of being on someone else’s time in a studio, it gave us plenty of time to try new things. We probably re-tracked the vocals four or five times. I think we tracked most of the guitars at 3 a.m. We still have no idea what we’re doing, but we’re doing it our way.”
Likewise, the video for “Heart 2 Break” takes an endearingly homemade approach with its hazy, psychedelic visuals aided as much by the duo’s strong sense of aesthetic as it is their purposefully dated technology—not to mention their struggle to adapt that technology to a modern world. “We’re ’90s kids and we love ’90s music videos: Samuel Bayer, Michel Gondry, Mark Romanek, etc,” Reichstadt explains. “So for this video we wanted to try and bring that feeling. We bought a vintage Sony camcorder on eBay and shot everything on tape—which was great, until we tried to actually use the footage. We basically bought an entire RadioShack trying to find a way to connect a ’90s camcorder to the computer. In the end, the only way to get the footage was to play it on a TV and film that with an iPhone. Not very ’90s.”
Check out the results below, and pre-order Lovesick ahead of its March 27 release date via Artoffact Records here.
