London duo CASSELS are pleased to announce that they will release theirambitious second album, The Perfect Ending, on 6th September 2019 via Big Scary Monsters Recordings. Following a UK support tour with Belgian noise band BRUTUS earlier this month, the band will be appearing at TRUCK Festivalin the summer, and announcing further UK tour dates over the coming weeks.
The album is available to preorder now: http://www.bsmrocks.com/bands/cassels/shop
The Perfect Ending is, in many ways, an album you’d expect Cassels to have made—packed as it is with left-field progressions and an impassioned take on contemporary issues. But while the first half of the record concerns itself with topics ranging from millennial liberalism (‘A Snowflake In Winter’) to sexual assault and victim blaming (‘In The Zoo They Feed Him Nuts’), the second tackles what is seemingly the biggest impending threat to the human race:environmental catastrophe. As is consistently the case however, Cassels approach it from a somewhat unique perspective.
Lead single and album title track ‘The Perfect Ending’ is out now, and forms the first of four scheduled interconnecting releases from the album – each with an accompanying video that ties together the narrative of the record.
“The title, ‘The Perfect Ending’, is my attempt to put a positive spin on the fact climate change is going to kill us all,” says guitarist and vocalist, Jim Beck. “I thought it would be interesting to try and write about environmental issues in a way that wasn’t didactic or preachy, and didn’t consist of me singing lines like ‘Mother Earth is dying, ooh yeah, we need to save the rainforests, man’ while mournfully strumming a lute.”
“All of the tracks on the second half of the record are an attempt to approach the subject from various oblique and surreal angles. The title track, for example, is about all the plants deciding enough is enough and conspiring to wipe out humanity before we take them with us. For me, humanity being wiped off the face of the Earth is a happy ending (though we decided we couldn’t call the album ‘The Happy Ending’ due to the obvious connotations with seedy massage parlours…). If you reflect on our contribution to the planet as whole, we totally deserve to die. We’re the only species intelligent enough to realise we’re killing ourselves and the world we inhabit, whilst simultaneously being too greedy to do anything about it.”
The band’s debut album, Epithet, was released in October 2017 and produced by Rocky Reilly (And So I Watch You From Afar, Adebisi Shank), receiving a swathe of praise from NME, DIY, UPSET, Goldflakepaint, Louder Than War and many more. Following this release the band embarked on UK tours with Single Mothers, Meat Wave and Youth Man, and a two week European stint withGender Roles. Over the past couple of years they’ve also played shows with bands including Idles, Car Seat Headrest, Ho99o9, Eagulls, Bo Ningen andSlaves, as well as festivals including Truck, Y Not, ArcTanGent, 2000 Trees andT In The Park.
The Perfect Ending is released 6th September 2019 via Big Scary Monsters
CASSELS Live Dates:
JUL 26 – Steventon – TRUCK Festival
The Perfect Ending tracklist:
1. A Snowflake In Winter
2. All The St. John’s Wart In The World
3. Mink Skin Coat
4. Melting Butter
5. In The Zoo They Feed Him Nuts
6. The Perfect Ending
7. The Leaking Ark
8. The Queue At The Chemists
9. The Woman In The Moon