Hand Habits announces new album 'Fun House' (watch the "Aquamarine" video)
Hand Habits have announced a new album, Fun House, which will be out October 22 via Saddle Creek. The album was produced by Sasami Ashworth (SASAMI) and engineered by Kyle Thomas (King Tuff) — with whom Meg Duffy shared a house and creative space in Los Angeles — and is new sonic territory for Hand Habits. “I felt a massive shift in the way that I was seeing the world and seeing myself, moving through certain emotional patterns and behavioral patterns, and really taking them apart,” says Duffy. “Sasami empowered me to take up a lot of different sonic spaces and challenged me to rethink these limitations that I had about my own identity. I wouldn’t allow myself to step into certain roles because of the little box I was putting myself in based on all of these false narratives that I had come to believe about myself. I think this also coincides with my trans identity too, because so much of that journey for me has been me really fighting against what I’m not ‘allowed’ to be.”
A prime example of the new sounds on Fun House is first single “Aquamarine,” which explores electro-pop while remaining still very much a Hand Habits song. “What originally started as a minimally arranged acoustic ballad, ‘Aquamarine’ evolved into the story of certain events in life, what informs my identity, the silence in the questions left unanswered that become the shape of understanding who I am,” says Duffy. “It was my goal to cloak some of the perils of mortality (lyrically) in a musical landscape that didn’t require the listener for a large amount of patience, to bring grief into the metaphorical club.”
The impressive video for “Aquamarine” was directed by V Haddad and shot in one take, involving choreography and a few wardrobe changes. “We filmed this video in my aunt’s bar and club in upstate New York, linking the origin and lineage themes in the song with the visuals of changing identities and characters in a space I used to wander as a teen.” Watch that below.
Hand Habits will play a special full-band album release show on 10/27 at Los Angeles’ Pico Union. Tickets go on sale Friday, August 6 at 10 AM.
Tracklst:
1. More Than Love
2. Aquamarine
3. Just to Hear You (feat. Perfume Genius)
4. No Difference
5. Graves
6. False Start
7. Clean Air
8. Concrete & Feathers
9. The Answer
10. Gold/Rust
11. Control
