Gold Record Share New Holiday Single 'Candy Cane'

The Bay Area / New Mexico-based band, Gold Record is excited to bring holiday cheer with their VOLUME XMAS EP out December 18 (pre-order). Today the band is pleased to share "Candy Cane" the lead single from the forthcoming release. The track premiered today at Rock & Roll Globe and will be on all streaming platforms this Friday. Rock & Roll Globe says, "VOLUME XMAS is preceded by five other EPs released across the year on their BandCamp page. We suggest you listen to them all, especially if you are a fan of where the likes of The 1975, Blood Orange and Shamir are taking rock 'n' roll into the second decade of the 21st century." About "Candy Cane" Gold Record's singer Noah Clark says, "The chord progression came first. I recorded it along with the percussion loop and took some time to listen to it while on a run in Lake Tahoe. It was never meant to be a Christmas song, but the melody in my head just only sounded correct to me when the words candy cane were in there. So, I just leaned into it and wrote 4 holiday songs. So fun."

Volume XMAS marks the SIXTH Gold Record release of 2020 - ending this bizarre year with good times and good tidings. Lovingly mixed by Alex Newport with additional production and jingle bells from STRNGS, Volume XMas finds Gold Record deep in their funky dance-pop roots, while also having a bit of fun bringing the spirit of the season in their interpretation of a Christmas album.

On the EP Bassist Evan Michalski adds, "As we looked into developing what became the Christmas songs - they fell into a really nice vibe and split the difference between being a bit silly, but also legitimately good and funky. Every time we talked about it, it cracked us up and brought a lot of joy. How could we say no to that? Plus the thought of then letting Alex Newport loose on the songs to scuzz them up a bit and end with something weird and great was very appealing."

Gold Record is pop music created by lifelong friends Evan Michalski, Noah Clark, & Ryan McKone. Formed in quarantine 2020 while spread out between the Bay Area, California and the High Desert, New Mexico, Gold Record came into being to keep a strong creative focus during lockdown and celebrate their love of collaboration and adventurous pop music.

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 50+ 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.

Gold Record will end 2020 with Volume XMAS and release a song every two weeks through 2021.

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