Providence’s Deer Tick has announced the June 5, release of their ninth studio album, Coin-O-Matic, through ATO. The LP casts bright light on a little-known facet of the American mythos: the hidden histories of the band’s home state of Rhode Island, where the everyday dramas of working-class families long collided with the menace of the mafia underworld.
As they tapped into their infinite fascination with that strange duality, singer/guitarist John McCauley, guitarist/singer Ian O’Neil, drummer/singer Dennis Ryan and bassist Christopher Ryan assembled a batch of songs exploring desperation, grief, redemption and resilience with both cinematic detail and lived-in emotionality. A sharp new turn from one of indie-rock’s most enduringly vital forces, Coin-O-Matic arrives as a complicated love letter to a way of life slowly slipping from the collective memory.
Coin-O-Matic is deeply informed by the singular experience of growing up Irish-Catholic. That is exemplified by the album’s lead single, the ramshackle jangle-pop “Mary Singletary,” which Deer Tick has shared today. It tells tender yet irreverent tale of interfaith teenage lust. “Most of the stories on the album are from my parents’ generation and the generation before that, when the idea of a Catholic and a Protestant getting together was very scandalous,” says McCauley. “With that song in particular, I liked the idea of writing about Catholic guilt and pre-marital sex and adding in a little bit of Looney Tunes-style violence—sometimes as a young Catholic boy, I did imagine a vengeful God cutting me down in a cartoonish kind of way.”
Coin-O-Matic Track List
- Dog Years
- Mary Singletary
- Endless Loop
- Sweetest Thing
- ACI
- Everything Born
- Eyelid
- I Am an Island
- 507 Smith
- Exit Door
- Candy Cigarettes
Photo Credit: Kalyn Oyer
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