Texas singer/songwriter Alex McArtor announced today the June 25 release of Welcome to the Wasteland by sharing the pseudo-title track, which premiered this morning at FLOOD. The EP opening "Wasteland" presents a gorgeously sprawling and nearly symphonic meditation on emotional displacement from McArtor's experience living in a suffocating Dallas suburb in her early teens.
FLOOD calls the track, "an opus of both catchy electropop and swelling orchestral compositions, all cowering behind the bold, slightly country-twanged voice of the young vocalist."
"I was sort of an outcast there and just wanted to get out," she says. "'Wasteland' is everything I felt bottled up inside me at that point in my life-everything I felt like I couldn't express when I was stuck in a community I felt so alienated from."
Welcome to the Wasteland unfolds like a surreal and spellbinding movie in music form. With her hypnotic voice and lavishly detailed lyrics, the 18-year-old artist follows her sharply drawn characters as they wander and stumble through a series of strange and desolate settings: empty highways, strip-mall parking lots, the wild expanse beneath a blood orange moon. When matched with the EP's shapeshifting sound, the result is an enthralling portrait of isolation and longing and self-salvation, at turns heartbreaking and fantastically joyful.
Naming David Lynch as a key influence on her intricate storytelling, McArtor wrote much of Welcome to the Wasteland on a trip to her family's lakeside farm in East Texas, where she was accompanied by fellow songwriter Henry Brill (Maddie Medley, Phantogram, Jack Garratt) and producer/songwriter Owen Lewis (Willie Nelson, Mavis Staples, Lady Gaga). "We'd write in the living room and then go hang down by the lake, come back up and flip some pancakes, then do it all over again," McArtor recalls. "It's a small town and really beautiful but also kind of creepy at night, and I think being out in the middle of nowhere like that really helped to create the world I was trying to build with the EP."
Recorded in Nashville and produced by Lewis, Welcome to the Wasteland fully summons that mystique in its mesmerizing sonic palette. A lifelong music obsessive whose father introduced her to countless new wave and alt-rock bands as a little girl, McArtor made a point of infusing the EP with elements of everything from dream-pop and post-punk to outlaw country and psych-rock. "One of the things I'm setting out to do is to find a world between bands like Echo & the Bunnymen and those classic country artists like Townes Van Zandt," notes McArtor, who's also deeply inspired by the brooding balladry of Chris Isaak.
For McArtor, Welcome to the Wasteland ultimately serves as an expansive and multilayered ode to her teenage years. "I feel like I've gotten closure on that time in my life, like things have come full circle, and now I'm free to move on," she says. And as her most ambitious and elaborately realized work to date, the project has helped immensely in clarifying her intentions as an artist. "Making this EP reminded me how much power there is in writing songs, how your lyrics and the sound can create a whole world, almost like a coping mechanism," she says. "I want to continue doing that, and get better and better as I progress and experience more of life. It's amazing to me that I can show people this world inside my mind and welcome them into it, and hopefully give them some kind of comfort and escape."
