Ray Bull has been the type of project that elicits more questions than answers with every new single or record dating back to 2021’s debut, Baby Mode—a title that could fill an entire Reddit AMA itself. With the project’s biography slowly coming together after initially being shrouded in the mysteries of a well-curated web presence (it’s the songwriting outlet for Brooklyn duo Aaron Graham and Tucker Elkins, we now know), they still haven’t shed their sense of contradiction. For example, their new album is called Please Stop Laughing and it also happens to be pretty funny.
Case in point, the release’s second single “Marry a Skater” is an earnest homage to the band’s professed influences on the warm, folky jam—Wilco, Neil Young, Karen Dalton, and, unignorably, Wayne Coyne’s yearningly high vocal pitch—while remaining lyrically irreverent to the serious-songwriter canon. “It is about being there for someone, it is about how the best way you can support someone you love is to give them enough space to fall,” the band shares of the song. “It’s about failure and absurdity adding to the grace and beauty of someone's presence. It feels like it fits into the larger album in the ways that it has pockets of different worlds and on and off sentiments. The outro was lifted entirely from another song. The original song turns off while a new one turns on. The harsher sentiment from the narrator in ‘All That You Are’ suddenly morphs into an almost comically open perspective in ‘Marry a Skater.’”
They said almost comically. So again, please stop laughing. Check out the visual for the track below, and pre-order the album ahead of its May 8 release via AWAL here. Stay seated; the indie rock mandolin-aissance is still unfolding.
