Connecticut art punk trio PERENNIAL are delighted to announce that their second album In The Midnight Hour will be released on CD & cassette on 1st February 2022, with vinyl coming 1st March 2022.
Forthcoming album In The Midnight Hour started out as a sort of conceptual challenge for Perennial: “How to make a punk album that doesn’t operate like a punk album?”. The answer came in part from the lovably daring albums that stuck out of their record collections—We Are Paintermen by The Creation, Horses by Patti Smith, The Shape Of Punk To Come by Refused, Sandinista! by The Clash. Take those guitars and drums, all that electricity and volume, and see just how many shapes you can make with it.
The New England post-hardcore three-piece started experimenting with structures, song lengths, instrument combinations; how loud a song could be but also just how quiet a song could be. Where a tambourine could replace a chord; where a bit of drum machine could stand in for a crescendo of guitars.
The band, who have been writing music for over half a decade together by this point, studied the joyfully bold art that inspired and encouraged them: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Ornette Coleman, Le Tigre, Otis Redding, Eric Dolphy, Stereolab.
Perennial had recorded much of their 2017 debut The Symmetry Of Autumn Leaves themselves, but for this new album they brought in Chris Teti of The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die to engineer and co-produce. The goal: to capture both the band’s more adventurous new aesthetic while also translating Perennial’s feral live energy on the stage onto a record.
The team also started paying more and more attention to how a song filled the air in the room during their writing sessions. Which parts kept ringing; which moments felt like living things. When a certain rhythm or chord or melody stuck around, Perennial were quick to pick up the lesson. Along the way, they started writing lyric after lyric about night: about the giddy, ghostly quality of the witching hour; the way a quiet room can feel like a haunted house. That twilight aura seemed to match the sense of surprise they were increasingly pursuing as musicians.
Before long, In The Midnight Hour had become a dozen odes to the nighttime, and the album’s sounds and silences became a matching suite, a punk album full of sudden quiet—a skeleton dance in a 12-room haunted mansion.