Ariel Pink has dropped the Haunted Graffiti from the band’s name (thanks to a legal battle with former drummer Aaron Sperske), has announced a new, double album that we’re immediately anxious to hear, and offered up our first taste—the track “Put Your Number In My Phone.”
The ’60s psych-pop imprint on Pink’s style is apparent, from the lilt of his voice down to the florid, Romanticist lyrics (“What would tame this gypsy heart but fruits from fresh on vine / Your luscious lips entice me to discover”). The flowery imagery loses its quixotic luster once he asks you to “put your number in my phone,” a jarring reminder that we are living in the twenty-first century, romance is dead, and getting a text from your beloved is as close as you’ll ever get to having a sonnet written in your honor.
He drives the point home with a recording of a voicemail from an annoyed female suitor he met at a “taco truck in Silver Lake,” which may be the most quintessentially hipster meet-cute ever conceived. Pom pom will be his first album (amongst twelve) credited solely eponymously, but as he notes, “it is by far the least ‘solo’ record I have ever recorded.”
Pom pom is out November 18 (via 4AD).
