BCMC — the Chicago duo of Bill MacKay and Cooper Crain — return with Tête-à-Tête, the second single from their forthcoming album Stash, announced in April and due June 26th via Drag City. The track arrives today, accompanied by a visualiser.
Where lead single Kaleidosmoke unfurled in patient, accumulative psychedelia, Tête-à-Tête sets a different course. Crain’s organ tears in early in a purple-tinged flourish that pulls prog, gospel, psych and funk into the same room, before the piece opens out into something stranger and more aerial. MacKay layers two tracks of guitar against each other in a call-and-response that traces an intricate, footwork-style figure, while Crain’s keys flicker beneath in pulses of electronics and distant siren tones. The whole thing rotates slowly skyward, nodding to later-period Krautrock without ever settling in one place.
Watch the visualiser for Tête-à-Tête below.
That sense of restless travel is, by all accounts, central to Stash. The pair describe the album as an intuitive blend of sounds gathered across hemispheres — traces of Arabian, Indian, Flamenco and soul moving alongside church-organ breaks and psych-blues soloing on synth. Touchstones flagged by Drag City span Ummagumma-era Pink Floyd, Nino Rota, King Crimson, Sandy Bull and Chick Corea’s Crystal Silence.
The duo’s 2023 debut Foreign Smokes, which we praised for its mellow, ethereal restraint, was largely improvised. Stash, by contrast, was tracked fully to tape at Electrical Audio and Crain’s Sweat Loge Studio, its architecture shaped by years of touring together. BCMC head back out on the road across the US this June; tickets are on sale now.
Pre-Order/Save Stash: https://lnk.to/bcmcstash
Catch BCMC on the road in the US this June; tickets are on sale now.
BCMC US Tour Dates 2026
June 5th – Milwaukee, WI @ Acme Records
June 6th – Chicago, IL @ Hungry Brain