Truthtelling, Worthitpurchase‘s album released last year via Anxiety Blanket and Citrus City Records, worked through troubling circumstances in order to paint a picture of a troubled world. “Recording took place amid raging wildfires and the global pandemic, forces which interrupted plans and made recording fragmented and difficult,” we wrote at the time, with songs like ‘Calendar Talk’ “exploring what it means to live and create in a world falling apart at the seams.” The band—that’s Omar Akrouche, Nicole Rowe and Eric Van Thyne—have made a name through their creative, spontaneous style, an aesthetic that proved the perfect vehicle to explore such themes. An engagement with the present receptive to everything unfolding around it and ultimately able to live up to the album’s title as a result.
Worthitpurchase have stayed true to this fluid and adaptable style in the intervening time. Though currently spread out across California, the outfit chose to lean into the changeable conditions, working wherever and whenever the opportunity arose, with whoever happened to be available at a given moment. Again, what might for others prove a barrier to creation was instead embraced as part of the process, and comes to form an intrinsic part of the work which results.
Today we have the pleasure of sharing ‘Big Canada’, a new Worthitpurchase single out via Anxiety Blanket which serves as a direct celebration of this changing, unsettled style. With intricate fingerpicked guitar, 12-bit drums and vocal delivery which plays like a stream of consciousness, the song plays like something between Big Thief and Boards of Canada (hence the title), and makes a home in the space between things. “The drum chop sounds like it’s coming off of Skype and the main guitar ended up getting recorded slightly out of tune, so we decided to embrace grainy/warped quality,” as Rowe explains. “It felt super nostalgic and reminded me of how life is really just a series of transients.”
Playing all your favorite songs
You’re nodding your head along
Racing past the old strip mallWe’ll go together
Towards city center
Where time doesn’t matter
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The song comes complete with a video filmed, edited and animated by Serena Hughes which further taps into the aesthetic, and you can watch it below:
‘Big Canada’ is out tomorrow via Anxiety Blanket Records and you can grab it from Bandcamp.
Photos by Margaret Leyva and Tanner Le Moine