Bloodkin has returned with its first new release in over a decade. Black Market Tango – a 15 song, double album will be released on April 16, 2021 on Cosmo Sex School Records and is Athens, GA-based Daniel Hutchens and Eric Carter’s first album of new material in over a decade.
Bloodkin has premiered their first single, “John Coltrane In Nagasaki” off the new album and the sprawling track can be heard below..
The story of Bloodkin began when 8 year olds Daniel Hutchens and Eric Carter met in West Virginia. Their friendship was initially built on their mutual love of baseball, comic books and rock n roll but by high school, they found themselves spending much of their time building the foundation of Bloodkin in Eric’s garage. The duo relocated to Athens, Georgia and over the course of their career has accumulated a catalog of more than five hundred original songs with gripping guitar riffs summoning hard grit blues and raw poetic lyrics that speak to individual passions and universal plight. Their masterful songwriting has influenced Widespread Panic, whose John Bell raved, “Bloodkin has been one of our greatest influences. Danny and Eric’s music has a consistent blend of poetry, intestinal fortitude, and song-craftmanship that I envy” and Dave Schools has praised, “Their ability to render their emotions in words blows my mind on a daily basis.” Patterson Hood of the Drive-by Truckers and Jerry Joseph have also named the band as influential, Joseph even name checks them on a song on his most recent album.
In the decade since releasing their last album of new material, Baby, They Told Us We Would Rise Again, Bloodkin released a career-spanning box set and Daniel released a solo album. While Danny and Eric would work on a song here and there, sending ideas back and forth via different technologies, as well as play gigs with an occasional new song thrown in, recording a new Bloodkin album wasn’t discussed.
Eric says, “I wasn’t sure there would ever BE another record. There’s always the assumption that there WILL be, but time slips by and life things happen, and then you start to wonder….”
Then in late 2018, a decade after their last album, Daniel and Eric started to talk about making another record. They got together to see what they had, Daniel with his notebooks and Eric with his stray pieces of music and lyrics, and sat for a few hours in Eric’s apartment, going through their ideas and playing their guitars. They realized they had something and that there was still plenty of chemistry to be found in their songwriting collaborations.
They reached out to David Barbe, who has been at the helm of many of their studio albums, and got started at Chase Park Transduction in Athens, GA in February 2019. Daniel and Eric were joined by band members, Aaron Phillips on drums, Jon Mills on Bass, and John Neff on guitar and pedal steel, as well as many special guests. They ended up with four sides and decided to release it as a double album with artwork created by the legendary Flournoy Holmes.
The 15-song Black Market Tango includes several tracks with the classic Bloodkin formula of Danny’s lyrics with Eric’s guitar progressions, but there are just as many that find the band stretching itself in new directions.
