Shannon & The Clams unveil new single 'Year of the Spider'
Photo credit: Kristin Cofer
“'Year of the Spider' puts a ’70s doo-wop spin on some troubling experiences lead singer Shannon Shaw went through over the last two years.”
- Consequence of Sound
Today, Bay Area’s garage-rock luminaries Shannon & The Clams unveil their brand new song, ‘Year Of The Spider’, the second single and title track from their forthcoming sixth studio album, due for release Friday 20 August via Easy Eye Sound / Concord.
Year Of The Spider is available to pre-order on all formats here.
A song that perfectly bottles the acute turbulence that songwriter Shannon Shaw faced throughout 2019 and 2020, ‘Year Of The Spider’ is a profoundly impassioned number saturated in emotional intensity, reflecting a time when Shaw was grappling with titanic life changes and decisions following her father’s cancer diagnosis and upheaval caused by a relentless peeping Tom.
“‘Year of the Spider’ is essentially the summation of my 2019 and 2020,” Shaw says. “I was being stalked by a peeping Tom for months and months, all while my dad was going through radiation treatment while the mountains around us were being ravaged by wildfires.
“It was an extremely intense time in my life and I just could not dampen the desperate desire to feel safe. I became really obsessive and was seeking comfort wherever I could find it.”
Landing Friday 20 August, Shannon & The Clams sixth studio offering Year of the Spider sees the purveyors of vintage-garage sounds reunite with their 2018 Onion producer and label head Dan Auerbach (The Black Keys), making the pilgrimage to Nashville to record the new album in his iconic Easy Eye Sound Studio.
Demonstrating their astonishing musical headway since bursting onto the scene in 2009 with their blues-inspired and R&B surf-rock sounds, Year of the Spider sees Shannon & The Clams turn their attention inward, while grand, cinematic sounds injected with tripped out slices of doo-wop, classic R&B, garage-psych and surf rock soundtrack the record's pensive subject matter.
An album raging against death, darkness, and disease with the power of a thousand angry Ronettes, Year Of The Spider is a prescient album ruminating on love, loss, and community, and how what we fear can ultimately serve to protect us.
Shannon & The Clams
Year of the Spider
Easy Eye Sound
Friday 20 August 2021
1. Do I Wanna Stay
2. All of My Cryin'
3. Midnight Wine
4. I Need You Bad
5. Year of the Spider
6. In the Hills, in the Pines
7. Godstone
8. Snakes Crawl
9. Mary, Don't Go
10. Leaves Fall Again
11. Flowers Will Return
12. Crawl
13. Vanishing
