Kevin Bronson on February 27th, 2019

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Ex-Foxygen drummer Shaun Fleming, who bends genre and gender as the uber-exuberant Diane Coffee, returns April 19 with his third album, “Internet Arms.” It’s a collection of gleaming glam-pop fueled by the seemingly oppressive neuroses inflicted by technology, specifically the duality of living two lives, real and online.

“It’s a personal study on how I feel about living with constant blurred lines of the self and the projected self,” Fleming said in today’s album announcement. “It became obvious as I was writing the album, just how entangled my social/emotional self is with technology, making me more exposed and simultaneously less connected. “Why are we so drawn to this existence? With ‘Internet Arms,’ I had a chance to explore these questions and it became very clear to me that I have a intricate and somewhat disconnected relationship with how I perceive myself and how I project myself.”

“I’m a prisoner of my own reservations,” he croons in the shimmering first single, “Not Ready to Go,” which arrived with a video directed by Joe Baughman.

“There’s no better way to explain ‘Not Ready To Go’ than a quote from world renowned negotiation expert Daniel L. Shapiro: ‘This is our drive to cling to an identity with which we are familiar, even if it is dysfunctional and personally damaging,'” Fleming says. “We have all had a version of this struggle, so I wanted to open a forum, a safe place for the discussion of guilt, shame, and for not knowing how to leave a toxic situation. I find it’s like I am observing myself within the relationship but can’t quite move my physical self out of the ‘repetition compulsion’ because the emotional ties are too strong. Fear of the unknown, isolation, dependency, and a feeling of deserving all keep us from breaking free of what is poisoning us. It’s so easy for the observer to think, ‘It’s their choice,’ but all our traumas and all the reinforcements make it very difficult to see how you found yourself in these loops and how to stop them. I hope the conversation can be constructive as well, shifting to how to find the strength to step out of a bad cycle and how to recover from the trauma.”

In 2018, Fleming portrayed King Herod in the Chicago Lyric Opera’s run of Jesus Christ Superstar before emerging from the studio with the new album,

“Internet Arms” is out via Polyvinyl.

||| Watch: The video for “Not Ready to Go”

||| Live: Diane Coffee performs June 13 at the Constellation Room (tickets on sale Friday) and une 14 at the Teragram Ballroom (tickets on sale Friday).