Brooklyn, NY garage/psych seven-piece Evolfo today announced their sophomore full-length, Site Out Of Mind, releasing June 18 on Royal Potato Family. The band has just shared the single “Strang Lights” which brings a pestery psych-rock delivery that sprinkles in their own novel twist of mayhem and prog – watch out King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard.
Recorded in a single take in the tiny, sweltering attic-turned-recording studio of band leader Matt Gibbs’ Brooklyn apartment, the driving rhythm and fuzz-drenched guitar of “Strange Lights” converge in hypnotic chaos to tell a non-linear story of frustration, helplessness, and multiphrenia in the face of rabid authoritarianism. “This song was never meant to be specifically about me and the time I was wrongfully arrested, we are loath to define the subject matter in such literal terms,” says member Gibbs. “However, it would be fair to say that this experience influenced my view of police and the judicial system, and that this particular set of lyrics would not have come to be without it.”
If the Brooklyn-based psych-rockers felt pressured to repeat the successes of their 2017 album Last of the Acid Cowboys they certainly didn’t show it. One might think a band that racked up 6 million plus streams on their debut record would try to recreate this by doing more of the same. But Evolfo step confidently forward into fresh sounds and more vivid conceptual subject matter. They have flipped the world of their 2017 debut Last of the Acid Cowboys on its head, departing the earth bound adventures in melting landscapes, rat cities, and desert sojourns for metaphysical territory and the mountains of the mind. “We’re always going to be in a state of flux,” says Gibbs, who formed the group a decade ago, “I consider this to be an exciting, positive thing. We have to embrace our own change.” On their brand new album Site Out of Mind, Evolfo reaches far beyond the confines of genre to create a colorful echo drenched psych rock dream all their own. Adorned with a mind bending cover by visual artist Robert Beatty, the result is a collection of songs that are unexpected, absorbing, and blissfully tripped out.
Partially inspired by concepts pulled from sci-fiction and one group psychedelic drug trip, Site Out of Mind is a thrilling spiral into the depths of the spiritual mind and the afterlife. Lyrically, Gibbs says, it could be interpreted as a continuation of the loose concept that Evolfo’s previous album hinted at. “If the protagonist of that album died at the end of Last of the Acid Cowboys,” says Gibbs, “then this was the protagonist’s internal journey, flipping the landscape, and going through the mountain of their mind in that moment of mortality; perhaps a blurring of brain activity between dying and death, between life and the afterlife.”
