News

Exitmusic Announce New Album

• 28th Feb 2012

Brooklyn, NY’s Exitmusic – comprised of Devon Church and Aleksa Palladino – will release their debut album, Passage, on Secretly Canadian on May 21st, 2012.

Passage is a long time in the making, and certainly worth the wait. Church and Palladino started writing together several years ago, when the Canadian-born Church moved to New York City, Palladino’s home, following a year teaching English in Taiwan and India. Their collective sonic interests – layers, textures, churning, spacious guitars (Palladino had been playing hers since age 12), blinking electronics, shimmering vocals – created a fruitful writing partnership immediately. Their songs began to take on new dimensions when the pair moved to Los Angeles a year later, finally committing their compositions to the recording process.

A few twists and turns (and a move back to New York City) later, Exitmusic found a home for their material with lauded independent Secretly Canadian, who released their first EP, From Silence, in Fall 2011, a four-song collection that drew critical raves both in the UK and overseas. The Guardian praised its “tsunami of pop noise” and the NME pronounced it “a gloriously luscious listen,” whilst Time Out said ”Spectral Washes of woozieness that start off with vocal woos reminiscent of Beach House before morphing into a digi-beat and banshee-blasted wall of noise.”

But whereas that effort was recorded entirely at Church and Palladino’s Brooklyn apartment, their new full-length, Passage, is a major step forward for the duo in terms of both recording technique and songwriting. With help from drummer Dru Prentiss and electronic musician Nicholas Shelestak, Church and Palladino spent several days this winter working with mixer Nicholas Vernhes (Dirty Projectors, Deerhunter) at his Rare Book Room studio, where they built on the duo’s beautiful, chilling aesthetic for a sound that is both more powerful and more nuanced. “I think there is something a bit more expansive in the new material,” says Church. “On ‘Passage,’ we cover a lot of emotional ground, and ‘White Noise’ and ‘Storms’ wound up having more pop elements in them than I think they would have had we recorded them a year ago.”