Dougie Poole Announces New LP ‘The Rainbow Wheel of Death’

Today, Dougie Poole is announcing his new LP, The Rainbow Wheel of Death, which will be released on February 24th, 2023 via Wharf Cat Records (Water From Your Eyes, Lily Konigsberg, Palberta). The album is the follow up to his beloved 2020 album The Freelancer’s Blues, an album that saw praise from outlets like Pitchfork, Billboard, BrooklynVegan, FADER, and VICE, who called it one of the Best Albums of 2020, describing it as “equal parts heavy and hilarious”.

Recorded with Katie Von Schleicher (who performs with Purple Mountains, New Pornographers, and Neko Case), the album is a showcase of Dougie’s unique and nuanced songwriting voice. It’s title nods to the colorful pinwheel that appears onscreen whenever a computer’s application stalls. As colorful as the album’s title itself, The Rainbow Wheel of Death finds Dougie Poole exploring new territory, breaking past the standstill of the modern era with songs that are as immediate as they are imaginative. Where 2017’s Wideass Highway and The Freelancer’s Blues told stories about alienated Millennials languishing in dead-end jobs and no-good relationships (spurring Aquarium Drunkard to anoint Poole “the patron saint of millennial malaise”), his new album doesn’t bear such a specific timestamp; instead, these songs are about more ageless concerns like mortality, love, and the passing of the time. If The Freelancer’s Blues tackled the everyday concerns of a certain demographic, then The Rainbow Wheel of Death is more concerned with universal issues that linger on.

Poole is sharing the album’s title track today to mark the announce, and the song is a brilliant example of the way that he adapts the form of country songwriting to atypical country contexts, transforming an artifact of computer life into a multi-faceted metaphor.

“The ‘Rainbow Wheel of Death’ is the unofficial name of the little loading animation that plays while your computer is busy,” Poole explains. “Different people call it different things but it’s an old symbol – from the early operating systems I think – and everyone knows what it means. Sometimes it disappears as quickly as it appears and will leave you to your business. Sometimes it takes over for a while and then lets you go. Sometimes it means the end. But we see it every time we boot up a computer – round and dependable like a little moon. My computer is almost ten years old and starting to slow down before it goes, so I’ve been watching the rainbow wheel more and more these days.”

Tracklist