The wrack line is the area of a beach where material is left stranded at high tide. A physical reminder of past elemental forces, created as the receding water deposits whatever it was carrying while its strength wanes, leaving behind a natural collage full of small treasures and hidden stories. Driftwood and kelp, seashells and unfortunate crustaceans, smooth pebbles and translucent agates, discarded fishing tackle and plastic pollution. On their new album The Wrack Line, out 7th July on Kill Rock Stars, Clyde Petersen’s Your Heart Breaks uses this image as a metaphor for his artistic process. The project’s twelfth studio album, it aims to capture what Petersen describes as “a lifetime of friendships, feelings and memories, broken free of a gyre and left upon the artists’ shoreline.”
Petersen wrote the songs collaboratively with a stellar cast of guests from across the globe, including Kimya Dawson, Christine Fellows, John K. Samson, R.Ring and Nana Grizol‘s Theo Hilton. Working via what the press release lists as “exchanges of concepts, hooks, riffs, and emotional conversations, processed through tin-can telephones, carrier pigeons, twilight dreams, and shooting stars,” Petersen plotted out each song with its co-writer. Then, in the summer of 2022, he joined the Your Heart Breaks studio band—Eli Moore and Ashley Eriksson of LAKE and Black Belt Eagle Scout‘s Katherine Paul—in Unknown Studio in Anacortes, Washington, where producer Nicholas Wilbur helped form the album.
We featured single ‘Snow Dusted Ponies’ last month, and now Your Heart Breaks have released another single, ‘Queer Fire’. Co-written by Seattle’s Vincent Sagisi, who also appears on bass and vocals, it displays a different side to the project, all slinky sensuality and shadowy negative space. Inspired by both the journals of trans-masculine activist and pioneer Lou Sullivan and the personal ads in Petersen’s collection of vintage gay magazines, it’s what Petersen describes as a song “about the power and strength inherent in desire and the ways that desire can push us to question and break normative boundaries.”
The Wrack Line will be released via Kill Rock Stars on 7th July. Pre-order it now from the Your Heart Breaks Bandcamp page.
