Dominic Angelella (mewithoutYou, Lithuania) preps solo EP (stream a track)

Dominic Angelella, who used to go just by Dominic but is now going by his full name (and is/was in DRGN King, Lithuania, mewithoutYou, Hop Along’s live band, and on Kendrick Lamar’s untitled unmastered), is releasing a new solo EP, Road Movie, on May 4 via Lame-O Records (pre-order). Ahead of the release, we’re premiering the song “Red State,” which is a nice, driving dose of traditional indie rock, and though the song sounds peppy and lighthearted, the events that inspired it were nothing of the sort. Dom tells us:

On my first tour with MewithoutYou, we traveled to Russia and played two shows, one in Moscow and one in Murmansk, a military city of about 300,000 above the Arctic Circle. This was at the tail-end of a three week run in Europe, the first time I had ever been out of the country save a few stray trips to Canada.

In Murmansk we played this crowd-funded DIY space that was once an auto-garage. As soon as our set was finished, the show was raided by Russian police and we were taken to a detention center to await further instructions.

We waited for hours, our flight back to America getting closer and closer, with no idea why we were being detained. After being interrogated one by one we were able to figure out that there was an issue with our visas and hastily paid a fee in order to make our way to the airport. we rushed onto the tarmac and barely made it out, 24 hours after landing, with no sleep.

This song was written later in the year after a tour through the American Southeast, in attempts to connect the red states of my country with the strange, wildly beautiful place that I visited earlier in the year.

Listen: