It’s been six years since Soft Palms released their debut album, though Julia Kugel and Scott Montoya have clearly been busy since then. For one thing, the husband-and-wife duo have continued to develop their annual Happy Sundays festival, a free, community-oriented music and arts event in Long Beach; for another, they run a nonprofit called Studios for Schools which sets up underprivileged classrooms with musical recording equipment. Beyond that, the pair just published their first book, with the title How to Be Self-Reliant in the Music Business being pretty self-explanatory.
It’s a similarly fed-up approach to capitalism’s dehumanization that informs the duo’s latest single from their upcoming second Soft Palms LP, In Echo. “Nervous As Hell” takes on the 24-hour news cycle and its continued evolution into unrepentant fear-mongering and moral corruption. The subject matter feels like a natural fit for Kugel’s somnambulistic girl-group vocals and the band’s penchant for instrumentation that sounds like Phil Spector on sedatives. “It’s capitalism in its most corrupt and inhuman form,” the duo shares of these mainstream news programs. They also note that the song was inspired by Kurt Vonnegut’s apocalyptic satire novel Cat’s Cradle: “the song is about the sense of anxiety that comes with constantly ingesting this hateful mendacious trash and not wanting to participate in that exchange. Trying to not get sucked into the vortex of mental garbage.”
The track’s music video—directed by Kugel and Montoya—echoes that sense of apocalyptic satire, with the duo barraging their audience with some very dubious chyrons broadcasted by the Dumbass News Network (congrats to the duo for cleaning up at the GRAMMYs, by the way). You can pre-order In Echo here ahead of its June 19 release, and check out their new book here. Additionally, you can catch the band on tour through September at the dates listed here.
