The Drums have announced their album Jonny, will arrive on October 13 through ANTI- Records. The album confronts the deep-rooted childhood trauma founding member Johnny Pierce experienced growing up in a cult-like religious community in upstate New York and triumphs over the long shadow the past casted on Pierce’s life and relationships.
Jonny is a love letter to a galaxy of Pierce’s younger selves. The toddler who endured life-rippling trauma, the teenager who built an armor to the outside world, the on-stage performer, the dancer and the lover. Each version is about Pierce’s life and how he felt was never enough.
The album is a reclamation a lifetime in the making. A series of naked self-portraits snapped when Pierce returned to his childhood home in New York a decade ago. Feeling a need to drive upstate one day while Pierce knew his parents would be at service so he took a photo in a prayer-pose in his father’s church office chair among other places in the house where something significant or traumatic happened to him as a kid.
It was an experience the artist couldn’t make sense of in the moment, let alone share with the outside world but the feeling of putting his nude body into the spaces where others had so often made him feel powerless was a triumph he would discover years later during the making of Jonny.
In the press release Pierce shares his thoughts about the upcoming record.
“When I finished ‘Jonny,’ I listened to it, and I heard my soul reflected back at me. It is devastating and triumphant, it is lost and found, it is confused and certain, it is wise and foolish. It is male and female, it is hard and gentle.”
The artist adds: “To encapsulate ones’ whole self in an album, to honor each and every part of you – even the parts that feel at odds with each other, is to make something deeply human, and because my religion is humanism, the album becomes a sacred place for me to worship. Each feeling a different pew, each song a hymn to the human heart.”
Alongside the announcement arrives “Better,” which drapes a glimmering hook over lyrics about lurching out of codependency and retreating back into reliable arms of loneliness.
As a whole, the song consists of harmonic instrumentation filling the with a rock vibe while the vocal performance serenades the ears with strong and heartfelt emotions.
Jonny Tracklist
- I Want It All
- Isolette
- I’m Still Scared
- Better
- Harms
- Little Jonny
- Plastic Envelope
- Protect Him Always
- Be Gentle
- Dying
- Green Grass
- Obvious
- The Flowers
- Teach My Body
- Pool God
- I Used to Want To Die
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