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Stream Owen’s Emotion-Wracked Album ‘L’Ami du Peuple’

Owen

“I got high with an art teacher of mine,” Mike Kinsella’s latest album as Owen, L’Ami du Peuple, begins. Due out July 2 via Polyvinyl, the Cap N’ Jazz, American Football, and Owls affiliate’s new record mixes the kind of disarming intimacy and art-stained craft on evidence in that opening line. Advance track “Bad Blood” is a crunching, lightly country-inflected confrontation with one’s family tree, capped by a searing guitar solo. The rest of the album further broadens Kinsella’s singer-songwriter with electronic tones, stomping drums, strings, and female vocals. By the end, he’s wondering aloud: “How long have I been sleeping? / I’m a dad and my dad’s dead.” Owen’s gentle musings are personal, but they’re not exclusionary; the album title, the name of a newspaper during the French Revolution, means “friend of the people.”