Photo Credit: Tayler Smith
Today, Brooklyn-based indie-rock duo MAN LEE (Sam Reichman & Tim Lee) announce their debut album Hefty Wimpy, due out March 7. Alongside the announcement, the duo shared a new single and video, “Celery,” premiered via Under The Radar. A hazy, bass-driven groove sets the stage for a song about being at odds with the myths, ideals, and rules of the working world, but not knowing how to deal with those feelings—and even momentarily giving in. “Celery” provides incandescent art rock that offers a sense of hope for a better way forward to those who are paying attention.
Lee explains “‘Celery’ is about looking around and seeing corporations for what they are. It’s about feeling the precarity of work when survival is predicated on the acceptance of business as usual.” Reichman adds, “There’s this natural ambivalence that slowly creeps in when we, as workers, sense that we’ve been commodified. When I read Sianne Ngai’s ‘Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting,’ I found these categories so perfectly captured my experience of the working world and all of its paradoxes, and I wanted to bring those ideas in.”
The accompanying lofi-styled video features archival footage of road trips, nature, and everyday life. All the digital media is arranged and framed in a way that evokes a coffee table book on interior design, inviting viewers into a contemplative world that contrasts the commodification explored in the song.
“Celery”: Listen / Watch
“Celery” single art
Produced by Arthur Moon (Lora-Faye Åshuvud), Hefty Wimpy is a collection of songs exploring misaligned expectations of the self and others, wrapped in a blend of psychedelic, art rock, and pop influences that feels both expansive and neatly familiar. Throughout the record, MAN LEE processes the things in life that feel most dissonant to them: faith in self vs. faith in religion, commitment in a life with a deadline, and finding meaning at work under capitalism. “Much of the album stems from the feeling of being resigned to our fates, though not disappointed. Just acknowledging what it is, where expectations have been met or not—right or wrong—and moving on,” the band explains.
Self described as an indie-rock band for the weary masses, MAN LEE is based in Brooklyn, formed by way of I-95. Songwriters and namesake of the band Sam Reichman and Tim Lee began writing together while living between Richmond, D.C, and Baltimore before finding their collaborators back in New York. Reichman’s vocals range from tight bedroom pop to wailing vibrato depending on the required level of interplay with Lee’s ever-fuzzy guitar expressions. Their lyrics conjure the openness of Cibo Matto and the blunt charm of CAKE.
‘Hefty Wimpy’ album art
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