Museum Of Love – the New York-based duo of Pat Mahoney and Dennis McNany – announces its new album, Life Of Mammals, out July 9th on Skint Records, and shares the video for their new single, “Cluttered World” (below). Life Of Mammals is a dizzying, hypnotic swirl of chaotic art rock and irresistible, metronomic dance music. You’re pulled along by celestial melody, brain churning oscillations and the low-end wobble of bass. From a distance, those sounds might seem familiar – a glimmer of Roxy here, a thump of both DAF and DFA there, the occasional Fripp-Esque clatter mixed with the pulse and echo of Studio One – yet up close, they take on unique new forms, thanks in part to Mahoney’s croon and dream state lyrics. Life Of Mammals is exactly the kind of surrealist escape route we need right now.
Mahoney, founder and drummer of all-conquering NYC band LCD Soundsystem, and McNany, known for his production work as Jee Day, formed Museum Of Love in 2013 and released their lauded self-titled debut the following year. Longtime friends, the two both come from an art background originally – Mahoney is a sculptor, while Dennis paints, and there’s a strong visual element in the Museum Of Love sound. The video for “Cluttered World,” directed by Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe, is an illustration of exponential scale that swerves into associative absurdity. Freeman elaborates: “We met with Pat and Dennis in March of 2020. This was the last in-person meeting we would have for many months. A little over a year later the film is complete but with the notions of ‘orders of magnitude’ and ‘cluttered worlds’ taking on even more surreal associations. Every initial plan we had was turned upside down but the foreboding beauty of the song persisted and, after it all, offered just the right atmosphere for a brief rejection of linear space-time perception.”
Museum of Love adds: “This wonderful video is our world as a negative reflection, a metaphysical karaoke version, in which the center channel, ie humans, has been removed and the clutter of our civilization can recombine and reorder itself in perfect equality, free of our shallow purposes and unimaginative usage.”
