Providence’s Deer Tick has announced the June 5, release of their ninth studio album, Coin-O-Matic, through ATO. The LP casts a 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 a 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

1. Dog Years
2. Mary Singletary
3. Endless Loop
4. Sweetest Thing
5. ACI
6. Everything Born
7. Eyelid
8. I Am an Island
9. 507 Smith
10. Exit Door
11. Candy Cigarettes

Photo Credit: Kalyn Oyer