Stream: Preoccupations, ‘Anxiety’

Kevin Bronson on June 15th, 2016

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Preoccupations — the Canadian quartet formerly known as Viet Cong — have released their first song under their new moniker, and it’s perfectly full of dread, though the opposite of dreadful. “Anxiety” is the first taste of their new self-titled album due Sept. 16 via Jagjaguwar. The quartet — singer Matt Flegel, guitarist Danny Christiansen, multi-instrumentalist Scott Munro and drummer Mike Wallace — found themselves working on the new record “in a state of near total instability,” with relationships in flux, their new band name undecided and the four having moved to different cities. That they arrived at the visceral is evident in the album’s one-word song titles: “Anxiety,” “Monotony,” “Zodiac,” “Memory,” “Degraded”, “Sense,” “Forbidden,” “Stimulation” and “Fever.” There’s something liberating in drone of “Anxiety,” not to mention director Yoonha Park’s video for the song, which they call “a catalog of childhood phobias and anxieties.”

||| Stream: “Anxiety”