New - Guerilla Toss - Famously Alive - LP

Loser Edition

Dig deep enough inside yourself -- start treating your body as your sanctuary rather than your enemy -- and eventually you'll find yourself blooming right back out into the sun. That's the transformation Guerilla Toss trace on their newest album Famously Alive, their effervescent Sub Pop debut. After a decade sprinkling glitter into grit, building a reputation as one of the most ferociously creative art-rock groups working, the upstate New York band have eased fully into their light. This is Guerilla Toss at their most luminescent - awake, alive, and extending an open invitation to anyone who wants to soak it all up beside them.

The album's title derives from a poem written by a close friend of the band, Jonny Tatelman, who supported Kassie Carlson through the early stages of her recovery from opiate addiction. The poem comprises the entirety of the lyrics to the title track, an exuberant ode to loving your own survival and charting a course into unconditional self-acceptance. Songs like the expansive, gleaming "Live Exponential" similarly invite the listener to lean into the light. Throughout the record, Guerilla Toss meet themselves with curiosity, generosity, and acceptance even for the harder parts of being alive. Opener "Cannibal Capital," a song about the exhaustion and dread of social anxiety, came together in a flurry toward the end of the album's sessions. A taut bass groove erupts into competing squalls of guitar and synth that support one of the most immediate and arresting vocal hooks of Guerilla Toss's catalog to date.

Famously Alive finds Guerilla Toss coming into the fullness of their power, celebrating their prismatic idiosyncrasies from a place of optimism and abundance.