Brookside Mall is bringing us their first new release in over five years with No More Fragrant Thoughts which is due January of 2024. Our first sniff of the project is their new song “NNNYN,” a shaggy indie rock jam that throws haymakers at listless uncertainty. Warbly guitar lines burble and glorp over one another sounding like it’s pouring out of concrete piping while a thumping drum rhythm impacts your chest with an industrial cadence. “Being twenty eight and still chasing contract work /Makes me a foster dog, my life a firework” is the growling preamble that echoes with dissatisfied acrimony, setting the scene for the chest-emptying chorus coming to combat the building exasperation. That leads in a teeth gnashing chorus that will have you howling “Give me something I can hit” as you thirst for that circumstance of empowering adequacy in the face of a vexing and bewildering existence in modern life. Here is Brookside Mall songwriter Brendan MaGee (he/him) talking about the new single;
“This one began, as you might imagine, out of an abundance of time, I moved to Halifax in 2018, and began whittling down the hours my partner was at work by applying for dozens and dozens of jobs. In a competitive market where I’d yet to make (m)any friends, I began to feel despondent about the devastating waste of time and energy that looking for work presents in our modern hellscape. Conveniently, a marathon of canonic baseball movies in the lead up to the MLB season brought about the perfect analogy to fit the exasperation I was feeling being a newcomer in Halifax.”
Listen to the new single “NNNYN” by Brookside Mall on Bandcamp. Catch more from Brookside Mall on their Twitter.