Premiere: SWIMM, ‘Sentimental Porno’ (full album)

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SWIMM (Photo by Alex Nelson)
SWIMM (Photo by Alex Nelson)

There’s a lot of sex on SWIMM’s debut album. Sex that’s real and sex that’s imagined. Sex that’s good and bad and sometimes good and bad at the same time. Sex as a euphemism and sex that expresses “True Romance.” Sex as currency and sex as the ultimate common denominator. Rom-com sex, blue-movie sex, secret sex, videotaped sex. It’s all here, under SWIMM’s bedsheets.

“After putting all these songs together I realized that I may come off perverted in moments,” acknowledges Chris Hess, the L.A. quartet’s singer-guitarist. “And that’s OK. But in each of those moments there is always feeling attached. A ‘sincere pervert,’ if you will. Caring (at times) too little and (at times) too much about the sex and all that it stirs up; nevertheless, caring. And so the album [is] called ‘Sentimental Porno’”

More a concept album than a collection of pop baubles that might end up on somebody’s Spotify bracelet, “Sentimental Porno” (out today) is the product of its creators’ crazy, mixed-up life in Los Angeles, a city where the ambitious navigate the “industries” and then negotiate with their creative souls. It’s an ongoing process, as Hess and SWIMM co-founder Adam Winn found when they moved to L.A. from Florida in 2014. Now, with SWIMM having added Hany Zayan and Marton Bizits, they unveil an album of funk-tinted, falsetto-laced psych-pop, alternately wound tighter than a newly single dude in a Hollywood club and slack/drunk from this city’s (and this era’s, for that matter) sensory overload.

It’ll make you squirm and smile, and maybe even delete your browser history and phone an ex. It’s for inside the bedroom and out. It’s schmaltz from the astral plane, which is OK, because gooey bathos beats pretend cool every time.

||| Stream: “Sentimental Porno” here, or via Spotify

||| Live: SWIMM celebrate their album release with a show at the Teragram Ballroom on June 21, along with the Fontaines and the Honeysticks. SWIMM also plays Levitt Pavilion Los Angeles on Aug. 9.

||| Previously: “True Romance” “Speak Politely,” “First Time”

||| Also: Watch the video for “Kim K”