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Los Angeles duo Peel release their debut album Acid Star. The creative partnership of Sean Cimino and Isom Innis, their bond was initially formed as touring members of Foster The People (now both official members live & on record). The two developed a musical language all their own over the years, ideas coalescing organically until the eventual birth of Peel. Inspired in part by genre-bending Creation Records bands like Primal Scream and Madchester groups like Happy Mondays, Acid Star expands on the industrial edge of early Peel, adding layers of psychedelia, electronica, and even reverb soaked freak folk.
“I look at Acid Star as a place where all of our expressions across different mediums were able to exist in the same orbit and create something new together,” shares Innis, “Lyrically I was trying to process digital mania, boredom, and joy in the present while sonically trying to make dance music through a band lens.” Cimino adds, “This album to me a tribute to the power of words and music that transcends boundaries from start to finish.”
The album is preceded by singles “Y2J,” a psychedelic dance tune with dream pop elements, “Acid Star,” a hallucinatory comedown of washed out acoustic guitars, “Climax,” which Paste Magazine praised as a “unique convergence of post-punk, electronica and psychedelia,” “OMG” & “Cycle.”
For Acid Star, the duo began by tapping into the music that they liked as kids. That is, the music they gravitated toward before they had “any taste or judgment,” as Innis puts it. “If you think too hard, and you try too hard, you can kind of ruin the expression that comes out,” he adds. “But there’s something about trying to recreate a song that was in my DNA before taste came into it that just sounded, listening back, like it had a lot of energy and life.”
The opener, “Y2J,” was one of the results of that childhood-song experiment, and is, appropriately enough, named in reference to Y2K. “Climax,” a song inspired by the 2018 Gaspar Noé movie of the same name, is a rocket-ship ride of a tune, as much within Nile Rodgers’ wheelhouse as Spoon’s.
Each side of the album is bookmarked by ghostly ballads—“Acid Star” and “The Cloak”—both driven by acoustic guitar and gentle vocals that push home the crucially melodic underbelly of Peel itself. “You’re smiling, laughing there, my acid star,” sings Cimino on the former song, an ode to an idea of a certain ephemeral and untouchable type of rock god. “That lyric is a tribute to the power of words beyond our everyday use,” Cimino says. “I was thinking of a term for someone, something, or an idea that is so meaningful—almost too important.” When it came time to decide what to name the album itself, it was right there in front of them.
Check Paste Magazine for a band description of all tracks on the new album.
Peel have shared “Cycle,” the latest preview off their debut album Acid Star, out March 29th. The creative partnership of Sean Cimino and Isom Innis, their bond was initially formed as touring members of Foster The People (now both official members live & on record). The two developed a musical language all their own over the years, ideas coalescing organically until the eventual birth of Peel. Inspired in part by genre-bending Creation Records bands like Primal Scream and Madchester groups like Happy Mondays, Acid Star expands on the industrial edge of early Peel, adding layers of psychedelia, electronica, and even reverb soaked freak folk.
Over an interlocking matrix of arpeggiating synths and a hooky bassline, the band repeat the mantra “cycle, only one that I know, only one in my head” before slipping into a hauntingly beautiful, pitched down outro.
For Acid Star, the duo began by tapping into the music that they liked as kids. That is, the music they gravitated toward before they had “any taste or judgment,” as Innis puts it. “If you think too hard, and you try too hard, you can kind of ruin the expression that comes out,” he adds. “But there’s something about trying to recreate a song that was in my DNA before taste came into it that just sounded, listening back, like it had a lot of energy and life.”
The opener, “Y2J,” was one of the results of that childhood-song experiment, and is, appropriately enough, named in reference to Y2K. “Climax,” a song inspired by the 2018 Gaspar Noé movie of the same name, is a rocket-ship ride of a tune, as much within Nile Rodgers’ wheelhouse as Spoon’s.
Each side of the album is bookmarked by ghostly ballads—“Acid Star” and “The Cloak”—both driven by acoustic guitar and gentle vocals that push home the crucially melodic underbelly of Peel itself. “You’re smiling, laughing there, my acid star,” sings Cimino on the former song, an ode to an idea of a certain ephemeral and untouchable type of rock god. “That lyric is a tribute to the power of words beyond our everyday use,” Cimino says. “I was thinking of a term for someone, something, or an idea that is so meaningful—almost too important.” When it came time to decide what to name the album itself, it was right there in front of them.
Check Metal Magazine for more information on the upcoming album.
Los Angeles duo Peel have shared “Climax,” the latest preview off their debut album Acid Star, out March 29th. Inspired by the 2018 Gaspar Noé movie of the same name, the song is an urgent blend of jagged guitar stabs and disco-inspired drumming. The accompanying video see’s the band performing the song, captured on grainy VHS against the concrete backdrop of their downtown Los Angeles loft. Paste Magazine described the track as a “unique convergence of post-punk, electronica and psychedelia.”
The creative partnership of Sean Cimino and Isom Innis, their bond was initially formed as touring members of Foster The People (now both official members live & on record). The two developed a musical language all their own over the years, ideas coalescing organically until the eventual birth of Peel. Inspired in part by genre-bending Creation Records bands like Primal Scream and Madchester groups like Happy Mondays, Acid Star expands on the industrial edge of early Peel, adding layers of psychedelia, electronica, and even reverb soaked freak folk, as seen on the title track.
"The sonic landscape of Climax nods to our post-punk roots, while the spirit and rhythm propel us forward into the realm of club and dance music” shares Cimino. “The lyrics are inspired by the Gaspar Noe movie ‘Climax’ and a bizarre rave I went to in Mexico City,” explains Innis. “The movie is about a dance party gone wrong because someone spikes the punch with acid and everyone freaks out, but our song flips the perspective - a psychedelic dance party gone right where everyone has fun. At the rave I was navigating this really dark dilapidated industrial building trying to find the basement where the dance floor was. It was like a crowded maze with all these hazardous drop offs and dead ends. That tone came out in Climax, the alarming but exciting feeling of dancing into the unknown.”
Peel’s innovative and emotional debut masters the integration of melodic synths and psych as it shape-shifts from one song to the next. Just ahead of the EP’s release, due October 16th on Innovative Leisure, Peel reveal their ethereal single “Citizen X” which also is set to appear on FIFA’s 2021 Soundtrack.
Peel’s Isom Innis explains, “Citizen X was an outlier to our usual stream of conscious lyric writing process— the framework began more conceptually. It has a tongue in cheek tone and is coming from a disillusioned place. Originally, it was a slower shoe-gaze inspired track, but Sean had the idea to re-imagine it, speed it up and really emphasize the groove and treat the guitar more like Robin Guthrie [Cocteau Twins].”
And as Clash writes: "Subtle but striking, 'Citizen X' is testament to the pair's absorbing creativity."
Peel is the debut project from Sean Cimino and Isom Innis; both multi-instrumentalists, as well as a visual artist and producer respectively. The project was born from a month-long recording session between the two artists within Innis’s concrete loft, above the Orpheum Theatre in downtown Los Angeles. Naturally, the cavernous space served as an industrial incubator for musical experimentation: where fleets of sewing machines once reverberated in the 1930s with metallic rhythms, now echoed a wall-of-sound of drums, amps, and modular synthesizers. Inspired by such legendary records like Second Edition [Public Image Ltd.] and The Pleasure Principle [Gary Numan]; records where spirit and improvisation guided expression.
Debut single ‘Rom-Com’ is available on all digital platforms. Check the Paste Magazine post for more information.