Stream: Mating Ritual, ‘King of the Doves’

Kevin Bronson on October 10th, 2019

0

Brothers Ryan Marshall and Taylor Lawhon are tall fellows with big ideas. Like their audacious, aw-shucks claim a few years back that, what the heck, they’d be releasing a Mating Ritual album every year.

Since 2017, when “How You Gonna Stop It?” came out, they’ve been good to their word. The following year brought “Light Myself on Fire,” and this past May, Mating Ritual released “Hot Content.” The duo are not even done touring behind that album — there’s a big home date at the Teragram Ballroom looming at the end of their fall tour — but today they released the first single from album No. 4.

“King of the Doves” finds the brothers dipping into their seemingly bottomless well of hooks, melodies and danceable beats. If “Hot Content” see-sawed between the duo’s electro-pop and indie-rock personas, the new single, rockin’ on rubbery and chiming synths, comes down on the electronic side.

The song, Ryan says, is “about not being able to go as hard as you once could, but going for it anyway. You know, the king of the doves. Everyone loves him, for a while at least. He’s the last to leave the party. He’s the first to crack a joke. He’s maybe been going too hard for a few too many years. He loves himself, for a while at least. Are you the king of the doves? Am I the king of the doves?”

The new single is also a test-tube baby of sorts. Lawhon said it was the first piece of music written in his new studio. “It started just as an audio test for every instrument,” he explains. “We didn’t know we were creating a song until the last possible moment.”

Consider the test passed.

||| Stream: “King of the Doves”