Thin Lear‘s forthcoming album Many Disappeared sees the songwriter Matt Longo use, as we wrote in a preview, “all things weird and unexplained as a way to explore themes altogether more human and personal.” For first single ‘Silver Bridge’, this meant the sixties legend of Mothman in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. “The song uses the myth as a way to investigate grief and its accompanied challenges,” as we continued, “pushing deeper than the usual cheap thrills of the story to probe at the weightiest of issues.”
Subsequent track ‘Witness‘ might not have concerned such a well-known urban myth, but was no less striking for it. Longo recounts watching a cat die after being struck by a vehicle, as well as the inexplicable nonchalance of a friend who saw it too. “The incident is still a touchpoint for me,” he explained. “Every time I come upon the same powerless feeling, whether it be through the loss of a loved one or the general anxiety that the veil between this world and the next is quite thin.”
With the album’s release fast approaching via First City Artists, Thin Lear has returned with brand new single ‘A Cherished Man’. Its predecessors might have held a sense of ambition in their themes and narrative, but this song pushes even further. A triptych of character studies which follows three ostensibly eccentric people through their honest attempts to connect with others from the margins of society. There’s Andy, who drinks so much each evening he draws a tourist crowd to see his public scenes of shame. Annie, whose isolated urban life is punctuated, or rather punctured, by her compulsion to poke people with pins, as though looking to prove her ability to leave any mark on the world at all. Then finally Charlie, a man who eats all manner of irregular objects, including corks, stones, birds and snakes, just to earn a drop of recognition. “I see myself in all of them,” Longo explains. “They’re looking for meaningful engagement, they’re just not sure how to broker it.”
Watch the video below by Ali Aschman:
Many Disappeared will be released on the 24th April via First City Artists and you can pre-order it now from the Thin Lear Bandcamp page.
