Deer Tick have announced their ninth studio album, Coin-O-Matic, due 5th June via ATO Records, and have shared the lead single Mary Singletary alongside a video directed by Colin Devin Moore.
The album takes its name from a cigarette-vending-machine company that fronted the operations of Raymond Patriarca, one of the most notorious mob bosses in American history. For singer and guitarist John McCauley, the Providence underworld is woven into the fabric of everyday Rhode Island life. “If you grew up in Rhode Island years ago, you’d see all these mobsters on the news and then run into them at a restaurant on Federal Hill,” he says. “They were criminals but also very colorful characters, and I wanted the album to partly reflect a certain nostalgia for that kind of seediness.”
Mary Singletary channels a different side of that world — the tangled strictures of an Irish-Catholic upbringing. “Most of the stories on the album are from my parents’ generation and the generation before that, when the idea of a Catholic and a Protestant getting together was very scandalous,” McCauley explains. “With that song in particular, I liked the idea of writing about Catholic guilt and pre-marital sex and adding in a little bit of Looney Tunes-style violence—sometimes as a young Catholic boy, I did imagine a vengeful God cutting me down in a cartoonish kind of way.”
The follow-up to Emotional Contracts, Coin-O-Matic is Deer Tick’s first self-produced album across their two-decade career. Guitarist Ian O’Neil describes the liberation of working without outside oversight: “It felt like the right time to peel off the Band-Aid and fully trust ourselves. Since we were working in our own space and there weren’t any limitations on time, we had the freedom to take these four-guys-in-a-room rock songs and experiment with different ways of decorating them.”
Guest contributions from Los Lobos’ Steve Berlin on baritone saxophone and former member Rob Crowell on organ add colour to what drummer Dennis Ryan calls “an unfettered capturing of who we are as a band.” McCauley, meanwhile, frames the album’s ambitions in geographical terms: “I think Rhode Island deserves to be a contender for a place that people sing about. Sonically, there’s nothing country about it, but to me it almost feels like a country record set in an urban environment—there’s definitely some outlaws in there.”
Pre-Order/Save: https://ffm.to/coin-o-matic