“We approached the album in a really old way of making music,” explains Meagre Martin‘s drummer Federico ‘Freddy’ Corazzini of forthcoming record Gut Punch on Mansions and Millions. “It felt like soul-searching as a band, the three of us together.” The trio, which also includes bassist Max Hirtz-Wolf and lead and founder Sarah Martin, hail from the US but are now based in Berlin, and back in August we wrote about how this shapes their sound. “Martin uses this distance from the US to better examine her home country,” as we put it, “be it religious fundamentalism or the ever-worsening climate catastrophe, all delivered with a country-inflected brand of indie rock.”
The gut punch of the title therefore refers not so much to the Meagre Martin sound but rather the subject matter they take on. The world as a series of debilitating blows. Previous single ‘Please Clap‘ invoked “an image of Jeb Bush floundering before a crowd as an archetypal example of the strange mix of brutality, banality and insecurity which marks the present American psyche,” as we wrote, while subsequent track ‘Mountain’ offers a decidedly more personal view. A picture of the persistent longing which outlasts precious moments, and our habit of torturing ourselves with such memories.
I saw your face,
As I’m lying awake.
I can never run fast enough,
To outrun my brain
Latest single ‘TBD (The Big Death)’ juxtaposes dreamy contemplation with a skipping momentum to return to such introspective spaces. Like a racing mind in an empty room, the song gathers an intensity from its own motion, outside pressures weighing inward as Martin’s vocals spiral with the repeated refrain. “I don’t ever wanna die.”
The wheels are turning.
The trees are burning.
No-
And we’re not learning.
Can’t find out way out.
Gut Punch is out on the 10th November via Mansions and Millions and you can pre-order it now.
Photo by Lamia Karić