Stream: Best Coast, ‘Leading’

Kevin Bronson on December 14th, 2021

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“Whatever happened to, believing in the truth?” Bethany Cosentino asks in Best Coast’s new single “Leading,” in which she channels a “healthy dose of pessimism” into a taut little punk-rocker.

That track will appear on the deluxe edition of the band’s fourth album, “Always Tomorrow” (a digital affair, out Jan. 7), which features five bonus tracks, including two new originals. Best Coast’s finest album, “Always Tomorrow” suffered a hard-luck fate: No sooner had Cosentino and partner-in-rock Bobb Bruno released the album in February 2020 (and celebrated it with a big show at the Novo) than the world shut down due to COVID-19. Almost two years later, Best Coast will embark on a tour in support of the album this January.

“When “Always Tomorrow’ came out, I personally felt like I had mastered the chaos of my own life (I literally wrote a song about it called ‘Master of My Own Mind’),” Cosentino says. “It felt like a bookend to all the other Best Coast records that wrestled with crisis and melodrama. But then, a global pandemic shut the world down, and I was forced to sit with what I thought I knew and then a whole new pot of boiling emotions started cooking up. There’s nothing like telling the whole world you got this and then realizing you don’t.

“What followed was a series of months that forced me to go deeper within than I ever knew possible. The type of depth I naively thought I had already tapped into, but like, ten thousand percent deeper. Not being able to tour and having an album that seemingly got swept under the rug before it really ever even stood a chance, did a number on me not just as an artist, but also as a human being.

“So as ‘Always Tomorrow’ turns 2 years old,” she adds, “and we finally set out to tour the album the way it was meant to be toured in the first place, the album evolves into something brand new. There may be an obvious lapse in time that is difficult for me, the artist, to ignore – but at its very core, it is still the same album I meant for it to be when it was created. A hand to hold through the dark times and a reminder that life is fucking tough, but you are even tougher.”

She explains that “Leading,” which features guest vocals from young phenoms the Linda Lindas, “is about trying to find hope during the apocalypse.”

Best Coast’s month-long tour will wind up with some SoCal dates in February (see below).

||| Stream: “Leading”