High Pulp Release New Album 'Days In The Desert' Today

HIGH PULP RELEASE NEW ALBUM
‘DAYS IN THE DESERT’ TODAY, LISTEN NOW

PERFORMING AT THING FESTIVAL, FALL TOUR DATES BEGIN SEPTEMBER 6

“Experimental Seattle collective at their most futuristic and concise … Fluid, cultured, but never willfully indulgent, ‘Days In The Desert’ refuses to sit still.” – MOJO

“Multiple guests adorn combo’s third set of bastard jazz … an irresistibly propulsive energy.” – Uncut

Called “a jazz rock odyssey” by The Needle Drop, West Coast experimental jazz collective High Pulp is releasing their new album ‘Days In The Desert’ today; listen to it HERE.

During a stint on the road right before the recording of ’Desert‘, the band became enamored by Tortoise’s ’TNT’ and Stereolab’s ’Dots and Loops. “Those albums were a guiding light for our process,” Granfelt says. As a result, individual solos gave way to group interplay: “It became simpler and more accessible, choosing a vibe, an ecosystem to have the listener hang out in.”

‘Days in the Desert’ makes this vision come true, finding the West Coast band fully emerging into their own sound. Rooted in the jazz tradition while also smitten by indie-rock and electronic music, High Pulp was willing to grab from all these sounds at once to pursue something truly their own. Their third full-length album (following 2022’s promising Anti- debut ‘Pursuit of Ends’), ‘Days in the Desert’ reveals the band realizing their strengths, deepening their own bonds, and pushing all these skills into a thrilling new sonic vista all but unimaginable just a few years before.

The New York Times says the band “blurs jazz, funk, math rock and indie rock,” and that their song “Dirtmouth”, which features ANTI- labelmate and tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, “bursts into its minimalistic cycles with breath and gusto: a leaping, sprinting, stop-start human presence roiling the systematic composition.”

And this record is a party, with not just Lewis an array of all-star guests that push the sounds even further out into the ether, including Impulse! harpist Brandee Younger and Madlib collaborator/ Brainfeeder OG Daedelus as well as Chicago guitar legend Jeff Parker. But despite the disparate genres represented, it all sounds precisely like High Pulp in the end.

High Pulp’s willingness to follow their musical loves across borders is evident throughout ‘Desert’ and it allowed the band to take chances it might not have previously. “We completely destroyed things that we had thought were essential to this album, things that we had been thinking about for years,” drummer Bobby Granfelt says of the album’s long recording process. “When we picked them back up, we realized we could keep anything or destroy anything.”

After performing at THING Festival in late August, High Pulp will embark on a fall East coast tour that begins on September 6 in Chicago. All upcoming dates are listed below.

TOUR DATES
8/27 – Port Townsend, WA @ THING Festival
9/6 – Chicago, IL @ Constellation
9/7 – Pittsburgh, PA @ The Government Center
9/8 – Elizabethtown, NY @ Otis Mountain Get Down
9/9 – Montreal, Canada @ La Sotterenea
9/10 – Portland, ME @ Oxbow Blending & Bottling
9/12 – Portsmouth, NH @ Press Room
9/13 – Boston, MA @ O’Brien’s Pub#
9/14 – Troy, NY @ No Fun#
9/15 – Brooklyn, NY @ Public Records#
9/16 – Baltimore, MD @ Joe Squared
9/20 – Minneapolis, MN @ Icehouse
9/21 – Kansas City, MO @ recordBar
9/22 – Denver, CO @ Ophelia’s Electric Soapbox
9/24 – Fort Collins, CO @ The Lyric

# – with Daedelus