PHILADELPHIA indie outfit The Ricos, whose Spirit State EP we adored last year in the heights of lockdown summer, have put together a video for their cracking single, “What Comes Next?” which we’re premiering here on Backseat Mafia today.
It’s a lovely autumnal swirl of the sweetest six-string indie noise-pop that reminds us – with that gorgeously sharp-edge, distorted guitar, and the raw passion Joe brings to the vocals – of a more leftfield early Galaxie 500, maybe bouncing around next to the Drop Nineteens. It decays into a necessary howl of feedback; righteous.
Like all of us round the world, The Ricos have endured the pandemic year with fortitude – this despite what Joe calls “somewhat of a COVID-19 scare within our practice space back in December.
“As you could imagine, it caused a bunch of postponements and cancellations for a lot of the promo stuff we were planning around that time.”
But guns blazing, they’re dusted down and ready for spring and summer 2021 – with the video for “What Comes Next?” just the first thing they have planned.
Joe says of the intimately filmed video: “[It] features footage of us basically creating “What Comes Next?” … which, for whatever reason, still feels like an ongoing process.
“There’s a lot of memories in this video … plenty good, yet some not so much. It was a crazy time filled with COVID-19 complications and other uncertainties.”
The band – singer-guitarist Joe Purcell, bassist Connor Wynne and drummer Daniel Fisk-Kallish – has, in recent times, been augmented by a second guitarist: Eric Hart, of fellow Philly pop endeavour Motel6, bending the band in new directions and new sonic heights.
They’ve filmed a live session with Philadelphia’s FM station WKDU, which will be with you at noon tomorrow, Eastern Standard Time (that’s 5pm in the UK); and an additional, rescheduled, live session with hometown videographer Bob Sweeney, from which 100% of digital ticket sales will be going to Juntos, a community-led South Philly Latinx rights organisation, and the Philadelphia Bail Fund. Great music for just causes. That’s live and direct from 7pm Eastern Standard Time this Friday, May 7th (or the witching hour over this side of the Pond).
And to cap it all, the band have screenprinted a new shirt design; watch for them over at Bandcamp, where you can also pick up the digital single release of “What Comes Next?” and that earlier EP.
Expanding on that single release, Joe adds: “One could say the general theme of the release has to do with uncertainty in general … whether that’s something you’re experiencing on a personal level or even on a larger scale culturally, in some societal sense, or something.
“It’s a shared feeling. I think that’s why we chose to really focus on this idea and play with it.”
They’re not wrong; it’s an anxious world; and they’ve couched it so excellently. It kinda sits as a companion piece to the Galaxie 500 cover of Jonathan Richman’s “Don’t Let Our Youth Go To Waste” for existential yearn. And that’s a very, very fine thing to be indeed.
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