Palehound’s Ellen Kempner and Jay Som’s Melina Duterte recently announced their new collaborative project Bachelor and shared acclaimed first single ‘Anything At All’. Today, the duo announces their debut album — Doomin’ Sun due out May 28 on Milk! Records / Remote Control Records — alongside brand new ‘Stay in the Car’ track and music video directed & edited by Haoyan of America. On the bass-heavy rock song, the duo paint a yearning portrait of a woman in a supermarket parking lot, a barely-contained desire oozing out of cotidian descriptions like: “She burns out of the market/ Plastic bags digging into wrists/ Blood stuck in her fingertips.”
Kempner and Duterte hybridized their individual songwriting talents, producing a collection that slips between moods with ease and showcases their lyrical prowess. While the album features collaborations with the likes of Big Thief’s Buck Meek and James Krivchenia, as well as Duterte’s partner and Routine-counterpart Annie Truscott of Chastity Belt, the record was largely made by the two musicians in isolation as a fitting precursor to the forthcoming year. Creating the space to explore significant themes from queerness to climate change, the collection also finds Bachelor experiencing pure, unadulterated joy: the kind of joy that can only come from creating, laughing, and having a ridiculous amount of fun with a close friend.
Written and recorded in Topanga, CA over the course of two weeks in January of 2020, pre-pandemic, Doomin’ Sun is a record steeped in friendship.
Pre-order / pre-save Bachelor – Doomin’ Sun: https://bachelor.ffm.to/doomin-sun