Prog-pop cult heroes The Mommyheads have announced the most ambitious album of their nearly four-decade career, CONEY ISLAND KID, arriving Friday, September 19 via FANFAR! Records in Europe and Mommyhead Music for the rest of the world. Pre-orders are available now.
A watershed release for The Mommyheads, CONEY ISLAND KID marks the venerable NYC-based band’s 15th studio LP and first-ever foray into concept album terrain. Highlights include the idiosyncratic first single, “Why Are You Smiling,” joined by an official music video, directed by The Mommyheads founder/frontman Adam Elk that premiered yesterday on Brooklyn Vegan and is streaming now on YouTube.
“‘Why Aren’t You Smiling’ is a song about questioning social norms and expectations,” says guitarist, singer Adam Elk. “How we’re always expected to smile and keep our composure, even while it seems everything around us is in a state of chaos. We assume to have the best intentions when reacting to extreme events, unaware that our micro expressions are telling completely different stories. We rented a Slow Motion Camera to catch all those wonderfully truthful and brutal expressions generally lost by the naked eye.”
WATCH “WHY ARE YOU SMILING” OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO
PRE-ORDER CONEY ISLAND KID
The Mommyheads will mark CONEY ISLAND KID with a wide range of international live dates, including a series of historic shows joining longtime friend Per Sunding of Swedish indie pop legends Eggstone on his debut US live tour. The dates – which will see Sunding performing Eggstone music in America for the very first time ever, backed by members of The Mommyheads, The Apples in Stereo, and The B-52s – get underway September 20 with a special record release show at New York City’s DROM. Long beloved in Sweden, The Mommyheads will first head to Scandinavia for an eagerly anticipated headline tour (including additional dates with Sunding), before returning home for Drom30, Dromedary Records’ weekend-long celebration of independent rock, set for Sunday, September 17 at Catskill, NY’s The Avalon Lounge. Additional shows will be announced soon. For updates, please visit www.mommyheads.com/live.
Last year saw The Mommyheads reaching new creative heights with GENIUS KILLER, hailed by Bay Area alternative newsweekly The Bohemian as “a tight, self-assured affair that sounds all the more youthful for its maturity.” CONEY ISLAND KID continues in that tradition, opening with an eclectic suite of technicolor prog-pop that uses archetypal Coney Island imagery to convey themes of desperation and soul-searching, complete with pierside ambience. The skeletal acoustics on “Spookarama” call back to the whimsical woodsy gloom of 1989’s now-classic debut, ACORN, while elsewhere, songs such as the epic title track (arguably the closest the band has come to full-on interpolating Genesis) and the angelic tone poem, “Onset, MA,” see The Mommyheads continue to gracefully channel existential anxiety and progressive influences in equal measure. Having devoted a lifetime to evolution, both in terms of sound and the ever-increasing scope of their ideas, CONEY ISLAND KID stands as perhaps the most cohesive representation of The Mommyheads’ glorious eccentricities thus far.
