The Albuquerque / Bay Area-based pop group, Albuquerque / Bay Area-based pop group Gold Record return for their 7th studio release of this quarantine season. Mixed by Matthew Neighbour (Matt Corby, The Avalanches), Party of the Century will be released on January 29 (pre-order). Today the band is pleased to share "Oh, Honeybee" the latest single to be lifted from the forthcoming release. The track debuted today at V13 Magazine and will be on all streaming platforms this Friday.
On the song bassist Evan Michalski says, "Oh, Honeybee was the return to our band roots using live drums and a rock feel." He adds, "The whole song captured a cool, frenetic White Stripes "Icky Thump"-era sound mixed with Arctic Monkeys feel that we just rolled with. Once we added the intro sax over the synth guitar and heard it going into the opening drum fill the first time - we knew we had a monster on our hands."
Gold Record's Noah Clark adds "Unlike most of my songs 'Oh, Honeybee' began with a drum loop I had been working on." Clark says, "The song began to take shape with the dark piano chords, glissando and the heavy, fuzzy counter melody. At some point it was taking a 'Mouse On The Keys' or 'Go Go Penguin' sort of a vibe, which had not been a Gold Record vibe up to that point. But, it was certainly a sound I was interested in exploring. So the guiding light was 'What would it sound like if a progressive or post rock band were pitching a song for a pop artist?" And that's the genesis of 'Oh, Honeybee." Mouse On The Keys meets Harry Styles."
Gold Record formed during shelter-in-place as a means to express creative energy over Zoom. The band is a suffusion of modern pop sensibility bleeding into a palette of classic rock influences. Their latest outing, Party of the Century, is an upbeat romp of party jams, classic 1970's festival music, and big rock energy fronted by lead single "Oh, Honeybee".
The band is a three-piece pop band that takes influence from a wide range of pop music recorded between 1973 and 2022. Equally inspired by classic pop acts like ELO, Aerosmith, and modern artists like Vulfpeck or Carly Rae Jepsen who fuse positivity with prolific output, the group banded together under the name Gold Record. The name simultaneously evokes a classic musical symbol (the gold record), while also paying homage to the Voyager space project where Carl Sagan sent a gold-plated LP of information about our civilization out to the cosmos on the Voyager spacecraft. That same spirit of the collaboration between art & science and sending directed creative energy out into the universe inspired this group into being.
Formed in 2020 during quarantine with members split between the San Francisco Bay Area and Albuquerque, NM, the first challenge was establishing a remote songwriting process that worked. Evan Michalski recruited lifelong friends Noah Clark (Brilliant Red Lights, Noah Clark & the Homewrecking Crew) & Ryan McKone (Big Wave Gun, Superfunk) to unite under the common goal of exploring the many aspects of the music they liked from many eras, and packaging it into a modern sound that blended a strong pop beat, a blend of electronic+live instruments, great production, Noah's uniquely percussive vocal delivery, and Ryan's soaring pop hooks.
The band developed a collaborative process colloquially dubbed "the cyclone", where any member can bring an initial idea to the table, and the other member's explicit intent is to uplevel that core idea and pass it around in a circle until its completion. This process of selflessness in collaboration creates an inertia or "cyclone" of creative energy that uplifts and infuses into the music and was inspired by Evan's background as a Buddhist monk where a similar process is used to write meditation music. Taking that unique approach into pop music has allowed the group to explore many aspects of the music they love without feeling tied to any one genre or idea. If it elevates the song - it's in. If the idea isn't happening - it's revisited later. The spirit of "first idea : best idea" is a guiding mantra of the group.
While building a backlog of 75+ songs during quarantine under a variety of stylistic banners, the band was inspired by the idea of working with many collaborators to finish the songs, rather than a single collaborator. Seeing this was a fertile time to work with other musicians in the community who were similarly locked down, the band developed a write-and-release workflow of simultaneously working on new songs, reaching out to their idols in the mixing community to finish the songs for future releases and bring in each collaborator's unique flair, and bringing the latest release to market.
Listen here:
Photo Credit: Courtesy of the artist.
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