Choir Boy are gearing up to drop their long-awaited sophomore record, Gathering Swans, which stops up the nearly four-year gap since their dreamy debut. With totally on-brand singles “Complainer” and “Toxic Eye” floating around, the quartet is ready with another preview: the heartsick “Sweet Candy.”
“‘Sweet Candy’ expresses the sugar cravings and lovesickness of someone who denies themselves the excitement and bliss of romantic fulfillment,” explains frontman Adam Klopp, whose Morrissey-esque vocals on the track deviate from the new-wavier preceding singles. “They’ve had a taste, but have opted for a sugar-free diet.”
Of the song’s inception, Klopp goes on to detail the psychedelic inspirations for the track: “Leading up to recording, we were struggling with the song’s structure and melodic arrangements. So on the first day working on it in the studio, [guitarist Michael Paulsen] and I took some acid hoping it would soften our biases. Midway through the day I began imagining the song as a neighborhood in a 1950s musical. When the instrumentation sounded natural to me, it felt like the characters were going about their business on a calm Saturday morning, chiming in to the neighborhood gossip when they saw fit.
“[Bassist Chaz Costello and keyboardist Jeff Kleinman] would play around with the beat and instrumentation and every ten minutes Michael and I would return from space with a twinkly piano or a character from our play. At some point, our friend Bly (who recorded and produced the record) began producing a meal of tomato sauce and garlic bread. The sauce was fragrant and seemed to take forever to cook. In the middle of someone’s take, the toaster oven bell dinged a great ding. ‘Someone’s cooking something good!’ I thought. So we incorporated the bell sound in the drums. The day continued like that with many ideas tiptoeing the line between rotten and wrong. Finally, after an exhausting day of stimulating playtime, we drank some fancy bottled water and went home.”
Gathering Swans is out May 8 via Dais Records—you can pre-order it here.
