Shares a new track, "Prisoner Of Love" taken from his forthcoming new album, Pure Luxury, out on 10th July 2020 via Memphis Industries & announces virtual album release party on 15th July 2020
NZCA LINES, the project of producer and multi-instrumentalist, Michael Lovett, today shares a standout new cut from his forthcoming album, Pure Luxury, out on 10th July 2020 via Memphis Industries. The glistening, disco-specked "Prisoner Of Love" follows the release of “Pure Luxury” which was A-Listed at BBC 6 Music and “Real Good Time”.
Taking its name from the Peruvian geoglyphs, NZCA LINES is the solo musical venture for Lovett who has previously played guitar/synthesiser on Christine and the Queens’ recorded material and has performed as part of Metronomy.
His previous two LPs earned critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic and found Lovett opening for the likes of Conan Mockasin and Django Django as well as performing at Glastonbury Festival.
About "Prisoner Of Love", which was premiered by Lauren Laverne on BBC 6 Music this morning, Lovett said:
"This song is about the cycle of heartbreak and dependency within a relationship that isn’t working, a constant motion of being pushed away and sucked back in.
Both people could be doing this, each at the mercy of the other’s emotions - unable to move forward yet unable to step away, the cycle repeats itself."
Produced almost entirely by Lovett and written between London, New York and Los Angeles, where he found himself present for some key UK and US political and social moments,
Pure Luxury revels in both the insular – the sound of one man processing anxiety-inducing world events - and the communal. Moving away from the themes of a fictional utopia and a fake apocalypse, in a world fast becoming what seemed like a real dystopia, the follow-up to 2016’s Infinite Summer is part disco pop, part hip hop grooves, all bassline - a record of diverse styles, voices and textures, expanding the musical universe of Lovett’s previous albums whilst cementing his own playful voice with an inescapable sense of joy and excitement.
With tracks written as a response to the notions of luxury, status, and the insanity of pursuing material wealth in the face of environmental catastrophe (“Pure Luxury”) and tackling the climate crisis (“Larsen”, a break-up track namely, the breaking up of the Larsen C ice shelf in 2017), the frustrations of conducting relationships through a video screen (the stately “For Your Love”) and the closing moments of a relationship (the bereft “Take This Apart”), Pure Luxury features some of Lovett’s rawest and most direct material to date. Tomorrow might be scaring the hell out of us, but, as Lovett reminds us on the album’s closing track, “tonight is all that really matters, as long as we keep dancing”.
To celebrate the release of Pure Luxury, NZCA LINES will be hosting an exclusive, interactive virtual album release party on July 15th 2020 with a live performance and other surprises TBA. Tickets are limited, cost £6, and are available HERE.
NZCA LINES plays his biggest London headline show to date at Heaven on 28th October 2020. Tickets are availableHE
“I was really saddened to read about that, and to picture how that must have felt for Tammy,”
says Boothby.
“I can’t relate directly, but as a survivor of abuse, I can only imagine what it would feel like to have to sing with my abuser, much less to have to sing love songs with him and act like everything is OK.”
“In my mind, the Transfiguration Highway is a road that runs from my hometown of Petrolia, through the small southern Ontario towns I grew up in, through to larger and larger Ontario cities, like London, until it reaches me here in Toronto.
Along that path, there’s a movement from quiet to loud. From slow to fast. From God to godlessness. From unique and charming houses to mundane condos. The path then stretches on to the north and to the east to Marmora, a place I’ve never visited but one that I’ve become entranced by.
I’ve come to view it as some kind of beckoning light further down the highway…”
In a shifting world, Little Kid’s Kenny Boothby finds himself inspired by this idea of transfiguration - a complete change of form or appearance into a more beautiful or spiritual state. The band’s forthcoming album, Transfiguration Highway, is a thoughtful reflection on revelation and change, both spiritual and lived. Through the lens of a long standing fascination with Christian mysticism, the album title suggests a reflection of Boothby’s own process of personal growth, the way that growth has changed his perception of the world, and how that has combined with the material change of the world around him to alter the way his past relates to his present.
Operating since 2011, and now joined by Megan Lunn (banjo, keys, vocals), Paul Vroom (bass & vocals), Liam Cole (drums) and Brodie Germain (drums, guitar, percussion), Little Kid has performed with artists like Car Seat Headrest, Horse Jumper of Love, Fog Lake and Half Waif, and built a cult audience with a series of idiosyncratic home recordings, self-released in short cassette runs that range from more traditional albums and EPs, to 2019’s Botched Restorations - on which Boothby sold out a run of one-of-a-kind 60 minute cassettes that each contained 10 songs from his discography, chosen by the purchaser and recorded live to tape in his bedroom. For their latest, Little Kid has signed with a label for the first time, working with buzzing Brooklyn indie Solitaire Recordings (Kate Davis, Common Holly) to release an album that sees a rare songwriting talent deliver on the promise of his earlier work on an expanded scale.
While the album represents a path of self-growth, the fictional ‘highway’ in question can also be understood as a road to spiritual awakening. Borrowing from Christian mystic tradition, a transfiguration can represent the journey where individuals bear witness to miracles, seeing transfigured sites along the way that ignite spirituality in them. Although the album may not be Christian Music in any sense, Boothby’s songwriting often plays with this religious language and imagery to explore the important spiritual questions.
“The title track was written soon after a visit to Petrolia,”
“It was the first time I’d been back in several years (perhaps notably my first since starting therapy), and it was the first visit where the town felt mostly unknown to me, and everything that did feel familiar made me deeply sad.
I no longer saw my childhood home as the setting of many of my happiest memories. The movie store I used to work at in high school had closed down, and a lot of the unique restaurants and stores in town were being replaced with popular franchises.
I was thinking about the ways my town had changed over the years, and the ways Toronto has changed so much in the few years I’ve lived here, and wondering what those changes are leading to - it certainly doesn’t feel like these places are moving in the direction of ‘a more beautiful or spiritual state.’”
says Boothby. These themes and his penchant for Christian imagery are deployed throughout the album in a variety of ways, often in contexts that display Boothby’s keen observational eye and sharp sense of humour. This is especially true of the roiling opener “I Thought That You’d Been Raptured,” which showcases an almost fabel-like narrative songwriting style from Boothby as he relates a story from the perspective of a character who comes home early from work to find his wife’s clothes in the living room and initially believes that she’s has been raptured, only to discover she is having an affair. In “Thief On The Cross”, Boothby uses his biblical literacy toward a bit of joking self-deprecation. Positioning himself as the penitent thief who, while crucified beside Christ, asks that Christ remember him when He gets to heaven, Boothby repurposes the idea to address feelings of jealousy within music communities and the perceived obligation of more successful artists to help out newer ones with the line: “praying you’ll remember me / when you finally reach / the entrance to eternity / I played in that old three piece / we opened for thee / way back in 2015.” Elsewhere on “What’s In A Name”, Boothby uses the famous line from Romeo & Juliet as a jumping off point for a rumination on the circumstances of his friends who have changed their names and how names may relate to gender identity more broadly. Far-ranging in both its sonic palette and its subject matter, Transfiguration Highway is a record of unusual depth and clarity from a songwriter who has spent the better part of a decade honing his craft and a lifetime building the perspective his songs so deftly express. These are personal songs that look outward, that seek to tie together the bigness of the world and the smallness of the everyday with both subtlety and humility. For years Boothby and Little Kid have been quietly building a devoted following, but their Solitaire debut is a beautifully formed introduction to the wider world for an artist who will undoubtedly be recognized as a uniquely gifted songwriting voice.
Little Kid's Transfiguration Highway is due out on Solitaire Recordings on July 3rd.
Little Kid - Transfiguration Highway