SPEEDY ORTIZ SHARE NEW SINGLE & VIDEO FOR “PLUS ONE”
TOUR (NEW DATES IN BOLD)
July 28 - Chicago, IL @ Wicker Park Fest
July 29 - Chicago, IL @ Beat Kitchen (w/ The Good Life)
Sep 5 - Philadelphia, PA @ Johnny Brenda’s
Sep 6 - Kingston, NY @ Tubby's
Sep 7 - Hamden, CT @ Space Ballroom
Sep 8 - Somerville, MA @ ONCE at the Center For Arts at The Armory
Sep 10 - Troy, NY @ No Fun
Sep 11 - Winooski, VT @ The Monkey House
Sep 13 - Montréal, QC @ Casa Del Popolo
Sep 14 - Toronto, ON @ Rivoli
Sep 15 - Lakewood, OH @ Mahall's
Sep 16 - Pittsburgh, PA @ Mr. Roboto Project
Sep 18 - Columbus, OH @ Ace of Cups
Sep 19 - Grand Rapids, MI @ The Pyramid Scheme
Sep 21 - Cudahy, WI @ X-Ray Arcade
Sep 22 - Bloomington, IN @ The Bishop
Sep 23 - Louisville, KY @ The Whirling Tiger
Sep 25 - Nashville, TN @ DRKMTTR
Sep 26 - Charlotte, NC @ Snug Harbor
Sep 27 - Columbia, SC @ New Brookland Tavern
Sep 29 - Savannah, GA @ Lodge of Sorrows
Sep 30 - Birmingham, AL @ TrimTab Brewing Company
Oct 1 - Memphis, TN @ Growlers
Oct 3 - St. Louis, MO @ The Sinkhole
Oct 4 - Cincinnati, OH @ MOTR Pub
Oct 6 - Morgantown, WV @ 123 Pleasant Street
Oct 18 - Washington, DC @ Black Cat
Oct 19 - Richmond, VA @ The Camel
Oct 20 - Durham, NC @ The Pinhook
Oct 21 - Atlanta, GA @ The Masquerade - Purgatory
Oct 23 - Miami, FL @ Gramps
Oct 24 - Winter Park, FL @ Conduit
Oct 25 - New Orleans, LA @ Gasa Gasa
Oct 27 - Houston, TX @ Black Magic Social Club
Oct 28 - Austin, TX @ The Parish
Oct 29 - Denton, TX @ Andy's Bar
Oct 30 - San Antonio, TX @ Paper Tiger
Nov 1 - Phoenix, AZ @ Last Exit
Nov 2 - Los Angeles, CA @ The Echo
Nov 6 - San Francisco, CA @ Rickshaw Stop
Nov 8 - Portland, OR @ Polaris Hall
Nov 9 - Seattle, WA @ Barboza
Nov 10 - Bellingham, WA @ The Shakedown
Nov 11 - Vancouver, BC @ The Cobalt
Nov 13 - Boise, ID @ Neurolux
Nov 14 - Salt Lake City, UT @ Urban Lounge
Nov 16 - Denver, CO @ Globe Hall
Nov 17 - Omaha, NE @ Slowdown
Nov 18 - Lawrence, KS @ The Bottleneck
Nov 19 - Des Moines, IA @ xBk
Nov 22 - Detroit, MI @ Lager House
Dec 16 - New York, NY @ Bowery Ballroom
Philadelphia rock quartet Speedy Ortiz recently announced its long-awaited new album entitled Rabbit Rabbit. The band previewed its first record in 5+ years by sharing “Scabs” and “You S02,” to praise from the likes of NPR Music, The New York Times, Pitchfork and more, and today Speedy Ortiz shares its next single. “Plus One” features jagged-cliff-dwelling riffs and thundering drums, and is accompanied by a campy horror homage from Dylan Mars Greenberg. But while the video is lighthearted, the song finds Dupuis exploring a traumatic childhood experience in her songwriting for the first time. Listen to the song and watch its video HERE.
Dupuis on “Plus One”:
I love touring, but the workaholism it encourages has been a convenient way to repress my feelings. In the pandemic, I found myself ruminating on my estrangement from an abusive family member. I’ve used my songwriting to process other experiences of violence, but had not broached these memories until Rabbit Rabbit. Being able to work on old trauma in therapy and in my writing has helped my boundaries elsewhere, and taught me to move on from exploitative relationships.
That’s what “Plus One” is about, and it came out pretty quickly as a sad acoustic waltz. I was sitting on the floor of an empty living room, mid-move, and the bare surroundings added a liminal starkness, though some of the imagery is inspired by scenes from West Philly that summer. When I went back to do pre-production, Texan post-hardcore was in my head, so I tried to channel At the Drive-In and Trail of Dead, bands that inspired me as a teen.
We made the video with director Dylan Mars Greenberg, whose campiness and B-movie expertise was a perfect fit for the band’s also very campy videography. We’ve done a ton of horror homages but had never paid tribute to an old school monster movie. Dylan’s pet bunny Voodoo was a perfect Godzilla-sized star—a cuddly rabbit who’s mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.
Speedy Ortiz will be back on the road with Rabbit Rabbit this Fall for a massive North American tour, spanning four months and more than 50 shows. See below to find a show near you, and get your tickets with the newly-announced dates go on sale Friday at 10 am locally HERE.
Rabbit Rabbit was co-produced by the band with Illuminati Hotties’ Sarah Tudzin (who also mixed the record), mastered by Emily Lazar & Chris Allgood at The Lodge (New York, NY), and was recorded between Rancho de la Luna (Joshua Tree, CA) & Sonic Ranch (Tornillo, TX). Rabbit Rabbit is also the first to feature longtime touring members Audrey Zee Whitesides (bass) and Joey Doubek (drums), who are now full time contributors alongside Sadie Dupuis (songwriter, vox, guitar) and Andy Molholt (guitar). To be fittingly released on September 1st via Dupuis’ own label, Wax Nine, Rabbit Rabbit is a nod to the superstitious incantation repeated on the first of each month to bring good fortune. Dupuis adopted this practice as a child coping with OCD and early trauma, so when she began to parse difficult memories for the first time in her songwriting, it felt like kismet to name her band’s fourth record after that expression of luck and repetition. But instead of re-treading old routines, the album finds Speedy Ortiz interrogating conventions, grappling with cycles of violence and destructive power dynamics with singular wit and riffs. The result is Speedy Ortiz at its most potent: melodically fierce, sonically mountainous, scorching the earth and beginning anew.
More on Speedy Ortiz & Rabbit Rabbit:
Speedy Ortiz debuted as Dupuis’ home-recording outlet in 2011, but the solo project quickly blew up into a full-fledged band beloved around the world for its pointed lyrics, disarmingly hooky choruses, and musical ingenuity—as well as its activism. The band has since released an expansive and critically beloved discography, toured worldwide, and inspired next generations of bands with inventive songwriting and advocacy to better the music industry. The group graced festival stages from Bonnaroo to Primavera, supported heroic artists from Foo Fighters to Liz Phair, and brought acts including Mitski and Soccer Mommy on some of their earliest tours. In 2016, the band relocated from Massachusetts to Philadelphia, with the lineup changing shortly thereafter to include sonically inventive guitarist Andy Molholt (Laser Background, Eric Slick), drivingly melodic bassist Audrey Zee Whitesides (Mal Blum, Little Waist), and heavy-hitting drummer Joey Doubek (Pinkwash, Downtown Boys). Rabbit Rabbit is the first Speedy album to feature the longtime touring members as full contributors, and Dupuis and her bandmates blaze with unpredictability, their intrepid playing thrusting songs in exhilarating new directions.
The gnarled guitars and imagistic lyrics that defined 2013’s Major Arcana, 2015’s Foil Deer and 2018’s Twerp Verse are still present, but Rabbit Rabbit’s recordings feel as vast as a desert landscape. “As I was channeling scenes and sentiments from decades past, I wanted to honor the bands I loved when I first learned guitar, ones that taught me to get lost in the possibilities of this instrument,” Dupuis recalls. Speedy Ortiz delved into its members’ most formative musical favorites—post-hardcore, the Palm Desert scene, alternative metal—pushing the agile complexity of the guitars and forceful rhythmic interplay between the drums and bass to unprecedentedly tricky extremes. “Every voice has a narrative,” offers Doubek of the arrangement process. “There is so much feeling and melody to interpret, and so much room to express it.”
Sadie Dupuis has remained busy outside of Speedy Ortiz as well, releasing solo music (and collaborating with the likes of Lizzo, The New Pornographers, Ben Lee and Backxwash) under the moniker Sad13, publishing and touring for two acclaimed poetry books, and running the Carpark Records imprint and literary journal, Wax Nine (Spacemoth, Johanna Warren, Melkbelly). In her past few years of work as a writer and interviewer, Dupuis recognized a recurring thread among artists with parallel backstories to her own: music had provided escapism from childhood abuse, but those same turbulent circumstances had normalized the grimmest aspects of the music industry. These were flashbacks she’d shied from, and constant touring enabled that avoidance. But while Rabbit Rabbit pulls no punches, either in its self-reflections or its call outs, there is still a sense of fight at the forefront of the record. That energy is fueled by the band’s activist efforts; Molholt and Dupuis are community organizers with the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers and its Philly local, which has worked to place instruments in state prisons. The band has also collaborated with harm reduction organizations, Girls Rock Camps, and other grassroots groups while on tour.
Drawing from literary influences that include workplace apocalypses, magical realist family dramas, and artists’ biographies, Rabbit Rabbit is Speedy Ortiz’s most ambitious and expansive record to date. Guitars remain the focus—the group played on about 50 of them, through over 100 effects pedals and 30 different amps—but the band incorporated a wide range of found sounds too, sampling everything from bedpans to debit cards to car washes to BB-guns. Dupuis added electronic tones as part of an ornate pre-production process, completed using a synesthetic constraint in which she immersed herself in a different color to arrange each song. As always, she designed the album artwork, which is a mixed-media painting of a fire-engulfed pickup truck, an image inspired by the trucks on fire she drew compulsively as a kid in therapy.
“I turned 33 while writing this album, a palindrome birthday and a lucky number associated with knowledge,” explains Dupuis. “I wanted to mark how I was making better choices as I got older, letting go of heedless anger even when it’s warranted.” The album’s stirring immediacy owes much to the band’s strength as a collective, working together toward a better future—or, as Molholt puts it, “constantly surfing the highs and lows in search of a stable place to land.” With considered muscularity, captivating earworms, and genuine solidarity, Speedy Ortiz is equipped to confront the world’s indignities—with or without a good luck charm.
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