Doll Spirit Vessel releasing debut LP; watch video for first single “Train Brain Rot”
Songwriter Kati Malison enlisted her longtime friend and collaborator Lewis Brown and another close friend, Max Holbrook, to record their debut album as Doll Spirit Vessel, What Stays, that's due out August 12 via Disposable America. "During the three years over which I wrote the songs on What Stays, I thought constantly about memory" Malison says. "How to conceive of the past without it, how to preserve the present in its stead. Sometimes I would write directly about my relationship to memory, but even when I wrote about other things, I was always looking out at the world from within that place. It colored everything."
We're premiering the video for first single "Train Brain Rot," that was directed by Malison and Jon Cox. It's a striking, catchy indie rock track, and about it, Malison says, "'Train Brain Rot' is about the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, and how little they serve us sometimes. I think I wrote it to help me let go of beliefs and ideas that once felt pretty central to my identity. The concept for the video came out of quarantining with my friend Jon Cox (Mother Moses, Sadurn) while we both had covid (I gave it to him on his birthday). I wanted to have it somehow visually convey the chaos and contradiction of inner life, what it’s like to be inside your own mind, forced to listen to all the thoughts on loop. It was a ton of planning, we even did a tour of all the middle schools in the area to find the perfect track that would be dark enough to make the spotlight look really stark against the background. We shot everything in two nights, for the first one we drove Jon’s van onto a track behind a random middle school and shot long takes of me running while my friends staged obstacles and threw stuff at me— it was very off-the-cuff and improvised." Watch it below.
DOLL SPIRIT VESSEL - WHAT STAYS TRACKLIST
1. A Need
2. All the Right Things in All the Right Order
3. Sun Death
4. Routine
5. Counting
6. Small Mass
7. Something Small
8. Train Brain Rot
9. Mirrors
10. What Stays
11. A Light