Montreal’s Dirty Beaches, a.k.a. experimental musician Alex Zhang Hungtai, will follow up his acclaimed 2011 LP Badlands with a double album called Drifters/Love Is the Devil on May 21. Over the weekend, Hungtai unveiled the latter-half title track, a moody, Mellotron-driven instrumental that could double as a moving funeral dirge. “This is my heart & soul. I need to get this off my chest,” Hungtai tweeted. “This title track has blood & tears all over it and is the sound of my empty self. I need to share this before it becomes something else. we always hurt the ones we love the most. I’m a rotten piece of shit. blast it LOUD if your hearts broken.”
As an added bonus, Hungtai is lashing out at people that criticize the song in the comments section on YouTube. When one fan mentioned that they were “expecting more than modulated synth chords” but still looked forward to Drifters/Love Is the Devil, Dirty Beaches commented back, ” i don’t care about pleasing your expectations . i just do what i want to write. you can judge it all you want. modulated synth chords. i was crying my fucking eyes out when i wrote this and punching myself in the face. i don’t give a shit what peoples expectations are. This is why I’m doing this record. its for myself and my life.”
And on that note, don’t forget that Dirty Beaches has been recruited to perform at the Yeah Yeah Yeahs-curated All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in London this May.
