Destroyer (CAN) shares new single ‘Eat the Wine, Drink the Bread’ from upcoming album LABYRINTHITIS
Photo credit: Nicolas Bragg
“ Dancier, more in-your-face sound of the last single, a bacchanalian reverie with some very funny/troubling lines”
- Stereogum
“Sonically a cousin to Kaputt's "Song for America," a little more overt in its New Order dancefloor intentions but no less intoxicating”
- Brooklyn Vegan
“Pleasant enough to play at a loud party, but blithely delivered lyrics might stop revellers short of trying the punch”
- Fader
Today, indie-rock outfit Destroyer – the critically acclaimed project of Canadian songwriter Dan Bejar – has shared ‘Eat the Wine, Drink the Bread’, the second single taken from the band’s new record LABYRINTHITIS, out Friday 25 March via Merge Records. LABYRINTHITIS is available for pre-order via Merge Records HERE.
Restless ruminations distilled from an idiosyncratic imagination feature on the second Destroyer single, ‘Eat the Wine, Drink the Bread’, a track swelling with Bejar’s shimmering peculiarity and verbose lyrics. Contrasting against the jagged theatrics of the album’s intrepid first single, ‘Tintoretto, It's for You’, new single ‘Eat the Wine, Drink the Bread’ sees Bejar’s musings stand tall against a backdrop of dancefloor-ready drum machines, driving bass and guitar.
Yet despite the indie-rock enthusiasm of his new release, Bejar remains lyrically disillusioned with where he heads, the melancholy of the unruly songwriter coupled with sombre piano.
Forthcoming album LABYRINTHITIS is a journey deep into uncharted Dan Bejar country. It brims with mystic and intoxicating terrain, the threads of Bejar’s notes woven through by a trove of allusions at once eerily familiar and intimately perplexing.
Written largely in 2020 and recorded the following spring, LABYRINTHITIS finds Bejar and long-term collaborator John Collins seeking the mythic artifacts buried somewhere under the dancefloor. Initial song ideas ventured forth from disco, Art of Noise, and New Order, Bejar and Collins championing the over-the-top madcappery.
Bejar and Collins conducted their questing in the height of isolation, Collins on the remote Galiano Island and Bejar in nearby Vancouver, sending ideas back and forth when restrictions didn’t allow them to meet. Ahead of mixing, the Destroyer band was brought into the fold to further the unprepared synchronicity and mutual discovery.
Lyrically, LABYRINTHITIS embraces widescreen maximalism, blocks of text dotted with subversions and hedges. Building from the koans of Destroyer's last release, Have We Met, Bejar continues to carve his words precisely, toying with expectations and staid symbols, while Collins’ production reconstructs the pieces into a unified whole.
Destroyer
LABYRINTHITIS
Friday 25 March 2022
Merge Records
1. It’s In Your Heart Now
2. Suffer
3. June
4. All My Pretty Dresses
5. Tintoretto, It’s for You
6. Labyrinthitis
7. Eat the Wine, Drink the Bread
8. It Takes a Thief
9. The States
10. The Last Song
