I’ll never forget showing up to my first day of work at a new job after moving to LA, asking what time I should come in every morning, and being told “Whenever, we usually roll in a little after 10 a.m.” Adapting to the city feels a bit like sinking into a hot tub after working strict 9-5s anywhere else in the country, and if the lore surrounding Dean Wareham’s long-anticipated sequel to his 2014 self-titled record rings true at all, it was a similar newfound sense of leisure that kept the dream pop and slowcore figurehead out of the studio for so long.
Yet I Have Nothing to Say to the Mayor of L.A. signifies an end to that hiatus, with Wareham claiming that the album nearly wrote itself as soon as he finally sat down to work on it. With the record’s lead single making good on the album title’s declaration over longing slide guitar and a dense, dreamy soundscape, the second single—the passive not-selling-out anthem “Cashing In,” arriving today—takes things in a considerably new-wavier direction. “Musically I was inspired by Michael Rother’s great, late-’70s instrumental guitar records,” Wareham shares of the tune, which also ventures into territory more recently trod on Amen Dunes’ minimal heartland-psych opus Freedom. “And also by Peter Hook; I played the new ‘Hooky 6-string bass’ I bought last year, it’s a big part of that early New Order sound.”
Watch the moody and era-appropriate video for the track, directed by LA-based filmmaker Leanna Kaiser, below.
