Speedy Ortiz Streams New Album Via NPR First Listen

Next week Speedy Ortiz will release Twerp Verse, its new full-length album and first in three years, but the album can be heard today as it's streaming early exclusively via NPR First Listen. In the Fall of 2016, Speedy Ortiz went to Brooklyn's Silent Barn to record what they thought would be their third LP, but following election day they knew they had to change course. "The songs on the album that were strictly personal or lovey dovey just didn't mean anything to me anymore--that's not the kind of music I've found healing or motivating in the past few years, and I was surprised I'd written so much of it," explains front person Sadie Dupuis. "Social politics and protest have been a part of our music from day one, and I didn't want to stop doing that on this album." So the band scrapped the album they made, Dupuis wrote more songs over the course of four months, and Speedy Ortiz created the urgent, taught, and pointedly witty Twerp Verse, out April 27th on Carpark. Pre-order Twerp Verse on DSPs HERE, at the Speedy Ortiz store HERE, or at the Carpark store HERE. Stream the album in its entirety via NPR First Listen HERE.

Speedy Ortiz frontperson Sadie Dupuis recently announced Gonna Be An Engineer: Breaking Barriers In Music Production & Technology, a panel discussion and workshop at the Sonos Store in NYC in partnership with Sonos and SheShreds - RSVP HERE. The band also announces an interactive exhibit at Rough Trade NYC on April 21st for Record Store Day called Twerp Furs. There will also be two album signings - one at Rough Trade NYC onApril 24th at 7pm, and one in Philadelphia at Repo Records on April 28th at 2pm.

Additionally, the final issue of The Archies featuring a Battle of the Bands with Josie and the Pussycats will be released next month, and features Sadie Dupuis of Speedy Ortiz as a judge.

On Twerp Verse, which was mixed by Omaha legend Mike Mogis (Bright Eyes, Rilo Kiley) and mastered by Grammy-nominated engineer Emily Lazar(Sia, Haim, Beck), Speedy Ortiz accelerate the band's idiosyncrasy through the wilderness of Dupuis' heady reflections on sex, lies and audiotape while adding surprising textures like Linn drums and whirled guitar processing to their off-kilter hooks. Dupuis, whose electropop solo project Sad13 debuted in 2016 shortly after her own move to Philadelphia, has become more instinctive in her songwriting-her home-recorded demos mirror Twerp Verse's songs in a closer way than any other Speedy record. The band's camaraderie and crate-digging is evident, with diffuse reference points like Squeeze, Hop Along, Prince, Paramore, and Brenda Lee being sucked into the band's chaos. Even when Dupuis sings of alienation and political weariness, the pop maelstrom swirling around her provides a defiantly charged, mussed-but-hooky optimism.

"You need to employ a self-preservational sense of humor to speak truth in an increasingly baffling world," says Dupuis on the album title Twerp Verse. "I call it a 'twerp verse' when a musician guests on a track and says something totally outlandish - like a Lil Wayne verse - but it becomes the most crucial part. I like 'twerp' as a diss, but in this meaning, the twerp is doing a service--shaking things up by being bold, not complacent, never silent." Now as public pushback against the old guards reaches a fever pitch - in the White House, Hollywood and beyond - the band fires shots in disillusioned Gen Y theme "Lucky 88," and casts a side-eye towards suitors-turned-monsters in the cold-blooded single "Villain." Closing track "You Hate The Title" is a slinky traipse through the banality of this current moment in patriarchy - in which survivors are given the mic, but nitpicked over the timbre of their testimonies. Tuned smartly to the political opacity of the present, Twerp Verse rings clear as a bell.

Speedy Ortiz is: Sadie Dupuis (guitar, vox, synths), Andy Molholt (guitar), Darl Ferm (bass) and Mike Falcone (drums)

Tracklisting

1. Buck Me Off
2. Lean In When I Suffer
3. Lucky 88
4. Can I Kiss You?
5. Backslidin'
6. Villain
7. I'm Blessed
8. Sport Death
9. Alone with Girls
10. Moving In
11. You Hate The Title

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