Activity announce new album, share “Careful Let’s Sleepwalk”
Brooklyn's Activity are back with their second album, Spirit in the Room, which will be out August 4 via Western Vinyl. The album was produced Psychic TV’s Jeff Berner and is a further honing of the band's alien, alluring sound found on their great debut Unmask Whoever.
“Unlike the first album, where we'd barely played live before we recorded, we got to take some of the less electronic songs out on the road in the fall of 2021,” frontman Travis Johnson says. “Some tracks had been incubating for over a year in our rehearsals. We could feel them change and open up in a live setting, so when we got back home, we went back to the drawing board on a lot of them. Some got scrapped altogether and we haven't played them since. You get an idea in your head of what it is, but it's something else when you're trying to hold other people's attention. Every part needed to feel earned or necessary.”
The first single is the darkly hallucinogenic "Careful Let's Sleepwalk." Says Johnson, “Lyrically the song is dream fragments, nights that all left me with the feeling of something being really wrong (danger, shame, repulsion) without there being anything happening in the dream to obviously trace the sense of evil back to. Just these internally grotesque and dreadful forms that are mundane on the outside. Everything seems calibrated to make us go insane now, and the feeling of the song corresponds to that.”
The song's video was directed by Activity drummer Steve Levine, who says, "We wanted to fit the mood of the song but also wanted to make fun of the heaviness just a little bit too. And we had fun making it." Watch that below.
Activity have a few dates lined up in June, including an album release show at Brooklyn's Baby's All Right on July 16. All dates are listed below.
Spirit in the Room:
1. Department of Blood
2. Heaven Chords
3. Careful Lets Sleepwalk
4. Where The Art Is Hung
5. Cloud Come Here
6. Ect Frag
7. Icing
8. I Like What You Like
9. Sophia
10. I Saw His Eyes
11. Susan Medical City
Activity 2023 Tour Dates:
7/13 - Boston, MA - O'Brien's
7/14 - Washington, DC - Pie Shop
7/16 - Brooklyn, NY - Baby's All Right (Album Release Show)