American Motors release new album Functional Music
Out now via Expert Work / The Ghost Is Clear / Vina Records
Features singles “No Horses” and “Marlboro Miles”, supported by The Guardian and Stereogum
+ New tour dates announced
American Motors Functional Music album artwork
American Motors, the Lancaster, Pennsylvania group, have released their second album, Functional Music, out now via three labels, Expert Work (US), The Ghost Is Clear (US) and Vina Records (ITA). The album features recent singles “No Horses” and “Marlboro Miles”, both paired with music videos.
The duo appeared in a number of end-of-year lists across the US for their 2024 debut Content, and made their follow-up with their good friend J. Robbins (Jawbox, Burning Airlines) at Magpie Cage. It’s a studio with pedigree; Shudder to Think, Girls Against Boys and Brainiac all recorded there, and the band leans into that history, treating the studio itself as an instrument rather than just a place to track a record.
Lead single “No Horses” was added to The Guardian’s Film & Music playlist, where it was called a “bleak, droll, Protomartyr-esque anthem”, and was included in Stereogum’s five best songs of the week, who wrote that the band “know how to construct a nasty riff and to present it in ways that feel perfectly off.” It has also landed on Spotify’s New Release Radar playlists and picked up radio plays across Europe.
Where Content built out a world in decay, Functional Music is about the people stuck living in it: waitresses, nomads, kids growing up too fast and dosed on catastrophe before they’re old enough to understand it. The band has pointed to New Hollywood cinema – Peckinpah, Easy Rider, Bogdanovich – as a reference point, each song written like a scene where the mundane tips into something bigger.
Listen to Functional Music HERE
Watch video for “No Horses” HERE
Watch video for “Marlboro Miles” HERE
Buy Functional Music HERE
Guitarist Dustin White has spent years as an “indie lifer”, playing in or running front-of-house for Pink Mountaintops, Times New Viking, Sea Wolf, and Dead Meadow, and Functional Music is where that decades-deep music-lifer perspective finally sits up front and takes the wheel. There’s also a strong sense of place running through the band’s writing: White grew up in West Virginia, and songs like “5480 Big Tyler” (named after a slum-lord apartment complex from his childhood) sit alongside a real vein of Appalachian detail across their catalogue.
On the album, Dustin White of the band said: “Making the first record, we established a conceptual framework to work inside of. This time we’re adding more detail inside that framework, and pushing against it slightly. We made some bigger swings in a few spots, but still just did what we do, which is basically whatever Alex and I find interesting. We’re still interested in experimenting with empty space and repetition. Working with J again was an absolute dream, and no band I’ve been in has managed to release a second LP while still continuing to function as a band, so this feels like a major accomplishment. It’s a little more interior to the exterior of the first LP. It’s a society, and we’re just living in it.”
Directed and shot by Dustin White himself, the “No Horses” video plays out inside real, working vintage computer terminals and mainframes at the Large Scale Systems Museum in New Kensington, PA, shot on an Arriflex 16ST with expired Kodak Eastman film stock. White taught himself the camera from scratch for the job, sourcing the second hand gear and shooting test reels to learn it before turning it on the band. Among the machines featured is a Data General “Dasher” terminal, the same model used as the visual template for the computers in Apple TV’s “Severance”, alongside genuine period hardware including a VAX-11/780 and an IBM System/390 mainframe.
Follow-up single “Marlboro Miles” is a single without a chorus, a slow lurch of murky, reverb-drenched hits and pauses that sits between Content and the new record. Dustin White said of the song: “This song feels like the connective tissue between our first record and the new one. It seems like a good way to signal that not everything on the record has big pop moments and plenty of it still exists in the same murky reverb drenched hit then pause world that we love. This one is really fun to play live.”
The “Marlboro Miles” video was made in collaboration with Amanda Lee McCarty, aka Clotheshorse, and was conceived as closer to an art installation than a music video. McCarty said: “The concept of Marlboro Miles (the real ones, not the song) is pretty dark at its core: buy more stuff from us (and in this case, that particular stuff is going to shorten your life) and in exchange…we’ll give you some different stuff that will advertise the stuff we sell. This isn’t necessarily a unique marketing idea. Yes, tobacco brands used to do this, but even today, brands, airlines, and grocery stores give you the chance to save up points and get free stuff. It makes us spend more money. But is the free stuff really that great? And is it really free?”
American Motors toured the East Coast with onelinedrawing in October, and have now announced new live dates:
American Motors live:
13/01 – Chapel Hill, NC – Local 506 *
14/01 – Charlotte, NC – Milestone *
15/01 – Charleston, SC – Royal American *
16/01 – Atlanta, GA – Drunken Unicorn
18/01 – Birmingham, AL – True Story Brewing
19/01 – Lexington, KY – Green Lantern
20/01 – Milwaukee, WI – MKE Ultra ^
21/01 – Minneapolis, MN – Zhora Darling ^
22/01 – Chicago, IL – Burlington ^
23/01 – Columbus, OH – Cafe Bourbon St.
* = with Pretty Baby
^ = with Pre Language
Tour admat
Functional Music tracklist:
Obvious
One Chord
No Horses
5480 Big Tyler
Margaritaville pt. 2
Marlboro Miles
Tragedy
Gold Star
Functional Music is out now via Expert Work / TGIC / Vina, buy HERE