From a post written as blogging babies back in 2012 to a piece on 2020 single, ‘Real Love‘, we’ve followed the evolution of Brian Sendrowitz’s Beat Radio as we’ve evolved ourselves. A project which started in the Golden Age of MP3 blogs and persevered through everything which came after. Be that the ambiguous changes the industry has undergone in the meantime, and personal things like marriage and the steady arrival of children. Or the ever-reverberating financial crisis, the ongoing global pandemic. A world generally ordered as though in hostile opposition to creativity and art. For better or for worse, only the truly passionate can last in music. And here we are in the year 2022, and Beat Radio is back with a brand new full-length album, Real Love.
Released with the good folks at Totally Real Records, the album represents both a new beginning and a return to the past. As we wrote about the single of the same name, Real Love sees Beat Radio founding member Phil Jimenez return to the fold for the first time since 2006, working along with Kathryn Froggatt to develop “skeletal” demos into “ornate indie rock gems” (to quote Zach Schonfeld’s liner notes). Be it with banjos, saxophone, violin or fine layered harmonies, the pair help to elevate the tracks into the richest and most detailed Beat Radio songs to date, all while retaining the distinctively earnest tone which has long marked the project.
So in that manner, Real Love is perhaps not so much a new beginning as a distillation of the Beat Radio spirit. A new attempt to say the things which need saying. One with extra help, further wisdom, and a clearer sense of what’s important. “There was nothing to hold back anymore,” Sendrowitz explains. “This whole record just feels like the record I was working towards my whole musical career. I went all in emotionally in a deeper way than I was capable of before.”
Today sees the release of the album’s lead single, ‘Family Name’. The keystone of a record which faces up to the difficulties of living and loving across time, confronting loss in its various guises and being open about the significant work required to sustain relationships. The song places Sendrowitz’s struggles into a wider context of intergenerational trauma, probing into some of the most tender areas in order to address the wound. In doing so, it comes to represent the newly unguarded tone of Real Love. Where honesty and acceptance are a mode of healing, and love is a tenacious thing.
I’ll take my time
as the hour gets late
survive this loss
accept my fate
rise up again
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Check out the video below, with videography and direction by Mary Kate Gilroy and edited by Bryan Bruchman:
Real Love is out on 21st October via Totally Real Records and you can pre-order it now from Bandcamp.
Photos by Mary Kate Gilroy