Today Philadelphia rock quartet Speedy Ortiz announces its long-awaited new album entitled Rabbit Rabbit. The band’s first record in 5+ years, 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. 

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). 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.

PRE-ORDER RABBIT RABBIT HERE

Following the recently released and revered single “Scabs,” Speedy Ortiz shares “You S02.” With a Touch and Go-indebted maelstrom of distorted solos, the Rabbit Rabbit lead single trains its gaze on apologists, union-busters, and other ex-punks who don’t live up to their public ethos. “Mostly when I’ve met my musical heroes, they’re kind and principled people. But occasionally someone whose work I love(d) reveals themselves to be anti-union, or anti-’woke,’ or some other gear-grinding ugliness. That’s who I wrote ‘You S02’ about, the song’s frenzied guitar and synth solos mirroring the crazymaking intensity wafting off people who act like that,” Dupuis explains. “In the TV show You’s second season, the main character moves from New York to LA in hopes of a fresh start, but (spoiler) remains a murdering psychopath. Changing cities won’t make you a hero if you still treat others badly.”

The Elle Schneider-directed video is a semi-homage to John Carpenter’s They Live, with Speedy’s heart-shaped glasses exposing a music industry phony whose private actions don’t align with her public image. It was mostly shot around Joshua Tree in the middle of the night, including at Rancho de la Luna, where “You S02” was recorded. Dupuis adds: “It was freezing out—Southern California was experiencing unseasonal snow—but the low temps fit the bill for a video about how revenge is best served cold (in a non-heated swimming pool).”

Track list

1. Kim Cattrall
2. You S02
3. Scabs
4. Plus One
5. Cry Cry Cry
6. Ballad of Y&S
7. Kitty
8. Who’s Afraid of the Bath
9. Ranch vs. Ranch
10. Emergency & Me
11. The Sunday
12. Brace Thee
13. Ghostwriter