Belfast psychedelic art-rock quartet Junk Drawer announce new album Days of Heaven for release on 6 June Pizza Pizza Records (Just Mustard). New single ‘Nids Niteca’ is out now with videogame inspired video, and a co-headline tour with Montreal’s Cola and Irish feminist punk band M(h)aol takes place through May and June.
From bucolic origins recording the album in rural Co. Wicklow Days of Heaven is Junk Drawer’s attempt to make a work of weird, cosmic Ulster music. The four-piece took inspiration from the way Gram Parsons, The Byrds, Grateful Dead and the likes created a language and pathway for cosmic American music by drinking in what came before and spitting it out via the inherited angst of growing up in a post-war world. The cultural black-magic of creeping cold-war paranoia is replaced here with localised trauma and healing,and growth and debilitation, as vocalist Stevie Lennox explains:
“I think a lot of it is about the lost promised futures that Ulster could have had-cross-community new towns, the decay that’s replaced it here, how I see the same thing happening in the middle east; how these memories are being erased, and so much of the history of this place exists within the silence of our fathers. How my generation has tried to heal by replacing those lost ideals by clinging to old objects, time in nature, the moments we’ve spent together connecting as people at 4am, where you feel like you might have discovered the point of it all. A brief moment in 1985 where a country united over a bespectacled man from Coalisland winning the snooker. Whatever it is, I think our music has maybe always been about peace, and where you can find it.”
This sweeping innate understanding of a city-wide feel is married to personal experience. Stevie’s brother Jake-who also shares in the guitars and vocals-was in the last couple of years diagnosed with Autism & ADHD, and sings about navigating that, and how it affects his senses, and perspective on the world.
On the first single taken from the record, ‘Nids Niteca’, they say:
“There was this empty shopfront we constantly drove past that said ‘NIDS NITECA’ in bold red on the way back from practice in the centre of Belfast. We realised it was this whole topic of conversation from everyone who passed it in town, and no-one seemed to ever remember it being open. It began as a sort of rumination on that, a tribute to this little in-joke that exists to a specific type of Belfast person, but really is about the meaning and decay of these structures and the sort of associations that get drawn to them, and how it all exists as much mentally in this hilarious fucking mess of a localised consciousness, that will be forgotten in time.”
Junk Drawer Live Dates w/ Cola & M(h)aol
May
28 –The Black Box, Belfast
29 –Sandinos, Derry
30 –Roisin Dubh, Galway
31 –Dolan’s Kasbah Club, Limerick
June
1 –Coughlans, Cork
2 –Coughlans, Cork
3 –Luca’s Records and Decks, Waterford
4 –Whelan’s, Dublin
Additional Live Dates
August
9 -Under The Drum Festival
October
23-25 Left of the Dial in Rotterdam
For more information on Junk Drawer please check their facebook and instagram.
