villagerrr – Portsmouth Raceway

“Zeroing in on life’s small, ostensibly ordinary moments to find the meaning within, villagerrr‘s latest album Tear Your Heart Out sees Mark Allen Scott embrace his Midwestern roots for a country-inflected brand of indie rock.” So we wrote in a list of our favourite albums of 2024, describing how Scott’s shifting relationship with his hometown Chillicothe, Ohio came to inform the very sound of the record. While the place might have felt constrictive growing up, fondness blossomed as the years passed, something Scott was determined to acknowledge with the new album. “I want to wear where I’m from and my family on my sleeve,” he explains. “I’m proud of the twangy influence in my music from corny country songs I’d hear on the bus rides to school. I feel like I’m reclaiming where I come from and making it my own.” The result, as we continued in our feature, was “a decidedly empathetic collection of songs able to zoom close to the smallest details of small town life, be it light through a sunroof, the smell of cut grass or pencil drawings made in an effort to preserve memories.”

Having now signed with the good folks at Winspear, villagerrr is gearing up to release a new deluxe version Tear Your Heart Out, not only giving the album a much desired vinyl edition but also adding a handful of previously unreleased bonus tracks. Back in August we previewed the release with single ‘Ride Or Die w/ Lydia’ (“featuring feeble little horse‘s Lydia Slocum, the track is characteristically fond and compassionate,” we wrote, “sitting in that liminal space between summer and autumn, where the shadows grow long and the colours tend towards a sepia glow.”

And now villagerrr is back with another b-side ‘Portsmouth Raceway’ as the latest single. Drawing on the famous landmark of its title and the local River Days festival, the track is again a meditation on home and all of its bittersweet connotations, full of summer haze and humid nights yet loaded with a sense of risk too. “If you get mixed up / In this town you can end up stuck,” as Scott sings, “You can say that you made a mistake / Coming home, it’s this place that’s to blame.” Yet counter to this is a warning of the striving required to make it out, the race to be run in the city with its constant competition and everything such efforts require.

You can work real hard
in the city you can be a star
You can learn all the ways to behave
You can be in the front of the race
Picture yourself
at the top with no one else
In the desert on a horse with no name
You can win but you gotta play the game
No one’s coming back to save you

Watch the video by Trevor Hock below:

 

Tear Your Heart Out [Deluxe Edition] will be released via Winspear on the 10th October and you can pre-order it now.