Derry’s resident lounge-lizard/experimental pop savant Neil Burns, AKA Comrade Hat returns today with a slinking, sun-kissed, seven minute porta-epic. A marriage of craft and intuition, journeying through louche tropicalia, psych and jazz-pop, it’s taken from his forthcoming two-volume compilation, Old Gods.
Written during an isolation-necessitated creative spree as progress on his studio album went on pause, ‘Summer of Glove’ sees an emergence of a more guitar-led, full band sound as opposed to Comrade Hat’s factory setting as bedroom producer. Burns spoke to us on the development of his forthcoming two albums, named for their spontaneous birth in fairly mysterious circumstances:
“Maybe I was channeling the cautious optimism of around May/June, when the sun came out and we all started to emerge from our isolation, but I found myself moving away from a more cerebral and introspective style of writing into something more intuitive and easygoing. The song was a half baked idea that I’d been toying with for years, but that just came together quite naturally in the end. In the context of the album, it’s a sunny interval in an Irish summer.”
“I didn’t really have a grand concept but I just trusted in the process and found that threads began to naturally emerge. In particular there’s a sort of dialogue of binaries that I think really comes to the fore: acoustic/electronic, simplicity/complexity, with different aspects foregrounded in each song, be it melody, harmony, texture or lyrics. I also found myself writing on guitar a lot, which I haven’t for a while.”
Comrade Hat’s next single will come out later in the summer, with the album following shortly thereafter. Vol. 2 will follow “as soon as I can get away with it” and is, as Neil tells us, “cut from the same cloth but with starker juxtapositions, I think.” Listen below:
