Critically acclaimed artists Deerhoof will return with Actually, You Can, their new album due out October 22nd via Joyful Noise Recordings. The band has shared the exuberant first single, “Department of Corrections” which can be heard below.
Produced by Deerhoof (Satomi Matsuzaki, Ed Rodriguez, John Dieterich, and Greg Saunier), their eighteenth studio album finds the prolific Earth-based band using their agility, wit, and outlandishness to create a new shared language of revolution, one powered by lyrical labyrinths and thrashing melodies. It’s Deerhoof’s ”baroque gone DIY” LP, and is described in a new album bio by Sadie Dupuis (Speedy Ortiz, Sad13) as “a genre-abundant record that uses technicolor vibrancy and arpeggiated muscularity to offer a vital shock from capitalism’s purgatorial hold.”
With Actually, You Can, Deerhoof proves that anything—from consistent creative reinvention 25 years deep into a career to self-actualization in the midst of global upheaval—is possible. Deerhoof proclaims of the album’s central theme: “Think of all the beauty, positivity and love that gets deemed ugly, negative and hateful by the self-proclaimed guardians of ‘common sense.’ We’d hardly be destroying society by dismantling their colonial economics and prisons and gender roles and aesthetics. We’d be creating it!” Actually, You Can is now available for pre-order digitally and on Chlorophyll colored vinyl, CD, and cassette HERE (vinyl will be released on November 19th).
While 2020’s critically acclaimed, overwhelmingly prescient Future Teenage Cave Artists explored fairytale visions of post-apocalypse and the anti-hero saviors of humanity, and its immediate sequel Love-Lore channeled futurist mid-century artists—Parliament, Sun Ra and Stockhausen, to name a handful—into an explosive patchwork medley love letter to the anti-authoritarian expressions that inspire the band, the optimistic and celebratory Actually, You Can finds the band drawn to an ethos of love and care which society’s masters largely ignore.
The album’s debut single, “Department of Corrections,” interrogates the prison industrial complex within the equally literal and metaphoric setting of The Last Supper. As the band explains, the song “is about all the marvellous mysteries of life that don’t add up on a ledger sheet or figure into an AI algorithm. It’s about Judas going electric. It’s about how the human species itself is meaningless without a planet to live on. How we vastly outnumber our would-be masters if only we could get organized.” Jess Joy, who lovingly created the stop motion video using her own illustrations and cardboard cutouts, explains the visual/song: “The video rhetorically questions authority. Who runs the show? A dying sun? Mushrooms? In wondering why we put limitations on our freedom, we realize that the people we have put in charge also do not know.”
Actually, You Can also marks Deerhoof’s grand return to biblical references ironically set to frenzied noise rock, as heard on their breakthrough series of LPs, Reveille, Apple O’, and The Runners Four. Its nine inspiring and ornate tracks utilize just two guitars, bass, drums and vocals. “For new listeners and decades-long devotees, Deerhoof’s electrifying, generous approach to collaborative worldbuilding on Actually, You Can is an emboldening call to support our communities with renewed strength, infinite love, and the resilience to keep exploring,” concludes Dupuis. Read the rest of her album bio HERE.
