New Album Release: Diet Cig - Do You Wonder About Me?
New Album Release:
Diet CigDo You Wonder About Me?
Released: Friday May 1, 2020 (Frenchkiss Records)
They’ve been compared to tornadoes, firecrackers, and lightning storms,
and described as genuine, unapologetic, and down-to-earth. Their live shows are
a whirlwind of belting and high-kicks, their pure energy as yet unmatched.
Almost three years since the release of their debut album, Alex Luciano and
Noah Bowman of gutsy rock duo Diet Cig are set to release their sophomore
full-length, Do You Wonder About Me? The pair, typically on the road, took time
off of tour to spend the better part of 2019 working on their follow-up to
2017’s Swear I’m Good At This. The new record marks a more intentional,
self-assured Diet Cig; not only in Luciano’s radically intimate, acerbic
lyrics, but in the duo’s sound as well.
Diet Cig formed in 2014 and went on to garner a cult following invested
in the band’s special high-energy, emotional, super-catchy pop rock. Their very
first EP, Over Easy, is basically canon in their world of hyper-honest, scrappy
indie music. Swear I’m Good At This cemented Diet Cig as mainstays of the
landscape, with its biting lines about social woes and prevailing message that
it’s OK to be who you are. Luciano and Bowman moved to Richmond, VA in the
summer of 2017 as a place to “hide out and make music,” and it was there that
they wrote Do You Wonder About Me?, Diet Cig’s ode to growing up.
“We spent a lot of time after the first record growing as people, being
humans outside of tour for a little bit, and trying to shed the imposter
syndrome.” Luciano says. Spending the time to make the kind of music they
really wanted to make and making sure they felt good about it was crucial to
the success of tracks like “Night Terrors,” the record’s lead single. (Not
rushing is, after all, part of growth.) It’s a slower-paced song than Diet
Cig’s usual, but just as biting; a song about reckoning with all the past
versions of yourself, figuring out who you are within all the people you’ve
been, forgiving yourself, and taking stock of who you are now. As Luciano puts
it, “Am I still these people, or have I shapeshifted?” It’s essentially the
thesis of Do You Wonder About Me?, considering and accepting the embarrassing
aspects of your identity, and how they’re just as much a part of you as the
good stuff. Like standout “Broken Body,” a meditation on self-loathing whose
chorus goes, “I’m still all the people I’ve ever been.” “No matter how hard you
try to curate yourself,” Luciano explains, “they’re always gonna come out.
There’s no hiding.”
“When we made our first record we almost felt like we had something to
prove,” Luciano says. It was their debut album, and much of it was written on
tour—the kinks in the songs worked out by playing them live. But the writing
and recording of Do You Wonder About Me? was imbued with more freedom. Diet Cig
had the sense that they could make whatever they wanted. Luciano and Bowman,
instead of practicing live to an audience, worked on their songs over the
course of a year in their practice space, and ended up finishing tracks with
their longtime producer Chris Daly at Headroom Studios in Philadelphia, PA, and
back in New Paltz, NY at Salvation Recording. Instead of making sure they’d fit
their live show, Diet Cig tinkered with songs until they felt right to them. As
a result, Do You Wonder has a freshness, a gleaming new direction. Fewer
boundaries. More truth, more honesty.
Exploring their sound led Diet Cig to a new dynamism. As Luciano says:
“‘You're laughing! You're crying! You're dancing! You're feeling emotional!’ We
wanna bring it all.” There are short, languid vignettes, like “Priority Mail”
and “Makeout Interlude,” alongside updates on the characteristic Diet Cig
sound, like “Who Are You?,” a bubbly track that reveals Luciano’s moon is in
Cancer, the anthemic “Stare Into The Sun,” and the record’s explosive kiss-off
of an opener, “Thriving,” which Luciano says feels like a cathartic release for
bitterness felt towards other people, as well as an acknowledgement of that
fact that it’s OK to still wonder what people think about you even if you know
you shouldn’t care. Ultimately, “Thriving,” and all of Diet Cig’s songs, are
being unabashedly human.
Tracklisting:
1. Thriving2. Who Are You?
3. Night Terrors
4. Priority Mail
5. Broken Body
6. Makeout Interlude
7. Flash Flood
8. Worth The Wait
9. Stare Into the Sun
10. Night Terrors Reprise
On The Web:
https://www.instagram.com/dietcigmusic
https://twitter.com/dietcig
https://www.facebook.com/dietcigmusic
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