TRANSCRIPT + BRIEF VISUALS UP TOP. Scroll down past it to just see the screenshots from the insta post :)

Okay, soooooo... Remember when I went to Bathurst? [Peter selfie on the beautiful mountaintop supercars racetrack at Bathurst] As it happens, I didn't go all the way to Australia just for that. (Which is not to say that you shouldn't. You absolutely should. I mean look at this shit. It ruled.) [Photo of the track on a downhill ess, trees, etc] If you ever listened to Northern Gothic, my old WAYO radio show, you may have noticed that I played what might fairly have been described as a disproportionate amount of music from Australia, and from the city of Melbourne in particular. [Logo for WAYO 104.3FM Rochester] At some point in the late '10s, a comment someone posted to a long-forgotten Stereogum story hipped me to this album by The Ocean Party, which I immediately fell in love with. It would be their last, sadly, as the band called it quits following the death of the immensely talented Zac Denton at only 24. [Cover of The Oddfellows Hall by The Ocean Party]

It was while rooting around their back catalog on Bandcamp in the midst of COVID lockdown a couple years later though that I stumbled upon the surviving members' new project, Pop Filter. That was the point at which I became well and truly obsessed. [Cover of Banksia by Pop Filter] Because these records are stunning. And also because the more I dug, the more I discovered—The Ocean Party didn't really end so much as it just went supernova, exploding into constellations of new bands and solo and related projects that I'm even now still finding out about. And literally all of it is brilliant. [Covers for other projects: Snowy, Lachlan Denton & Studio Magic, Partner Look, Zac Denton, Relief Pop, Timeshare, Cool Sounds, Emma Russack & Lachlan Denton, Velcro].

When I realized last summer that I'd played my last Mountain Goats show, I was in a bit of a state (as you can possibly imagine). Like, okay boss, wtf are you gonna do now? The thing that's become our Tired podcast was one idea. [Logo for Tired] But I'd also been sitting on some songs for a while that felt like the beginnings of an actual album. And one night I got a wild hair and sent a long email to this dude Snowy from Pop Filter. I knew from following him on here that he did a lot of production and mixing work for other people, and I also knew that everything he touched sounded incredible. [Cover for Age Difference by Snowy Band] To paraphrase our back-and-forth: "Hey, you wanna do something together?" "Sure, what'd you have in mind?" "I mean, I've got some songs, it'd prob make the most sense to do stuff remotely? Less practical but more fun would be I get on a plan. If that's a possibility, maybe we could do it in January? This is gonna sound ridiculoud but there's this car race..." "Oh man you HAVE to go to Bathurst!" [Wikihow style art of person at computer]

I was beside myself with excitement making plans, but as the date approached I started getting anxious. Like, I've been on both sides of this equation long enough to know that however much you might *think* you know someone from listening to their music, you don't actually know them at all. Before I left I watched Conner O'Malley's insane Rap World movie and all I could think was, what if I go all the way to Australia and it just ends up being this? [Still from the film Rap World by Conner O'Malley] My fears proved unfounded. We spent a couple days tracking with the Melbourne contingent of Pop Filter—Snowy, Lachlan, Jordan and Curtis—in the rustic cabin where they'd recorded the second PF album, Donkey Gulley Road. It was indescribably beautiful and ridiculously fun. And as it turned out, my instincts were 100% on the money: these were some of the best people I'd ever made music with. Total kindred spirits. Just an absolute joy. [Photo of Curtis, Jordan, Lachlan, and Snowy in the studio]

Snowy and I then spent a couple more days at his studio space back in Melbourne doing vocals and making notes for overdubs and mix ideas before I headed off to Mount Panorama and my dates with Valentino Rossi and Jacky Ickx. Over the next few months Snowy and company turned what we'd done into the finished product that I've been aching to share with the world ever since. [Studio photo]

The album is called Half-Staff Blues. It's a bunch of songs about life in the imperial core as it enters its final death throes. The oldest of them is one called "Suicide Cult" that I released in home-recorded form back in the halcyon summer of 2020, but the rest are all new. And if I may be so bold, I think it fucking kicks ass. These guys did such an incredible job bringing my songs to life. I listen to it and I can't help but grin the entire time. [Album cover] Single and video will go live this Friday, August 1, with the full album out on September 5. There'll be a Bandcamp pre-order page and it'll be in all the other places too. NFT, shitcoin, and an exclusive next-gen AI chatbot to follow. It's gonna be sick.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.