Mild High Club Announces New Album ‘Skiptracing’,

Out August 26 On Stones Throw Records,

Listen To Lead Single “Homage”

Mild High Club has announced their second full-length album, ‘Skiptracing’, out August 26 on Stones Throw Records via Inertia Music. It’s the follow up to last year’s ‘Timeline’. Today they’re sharing the first single from ‘Skiptracing’, “Homage”.

Listen to “Homage” here

It’s been quite the journey for Mild High Club founder Alexander Brettin. He grew up playing flute in the school band and majoring in jazz studies in Chicago. In 2012, a visit to Los Angeles allowed him to connect with the Stones Throw crew. Within a year, after passing the early demos of what would become ‘Timeline’ onto Peanut Butter Wolf, Brettin made the move out west.

“The difference between ‘Timeline’ and ‘Skiptracing’ is detail,” Brettin said. “I was stubborn with the process for ‘Timeline’; it took almost three years to let go of it.” On ‘Timeline’, Brettin resorted to vague lyrics so as to highlight the music itself. But for ‘Skiptracing’ there’s both a heightened thematic aspect as well as more complex musical arrangements encasing it. In Brettin’s estimation, the album’s story arc is that of a “private investigator attempting to trace the steps of the sound and the spirit of American music.”

And in investigating the spirit of American music, Mild High Club re-imagine AM radio hits as blasting in from a parallel universe, the sound of early 70s LA in a smog of sativa. If Todd Rundgren was the primary touchstone for ‘Timeline’, Brettin and band now look to the wry, trenchant wit of Steely Dan, gazing deep into the dark underbelly of sun-bright LA and coming away with catchy songs underpinned by slippery jazz phrasings.

Dig deeper into the lyrics and imagery and that detective story slowly emerges. But it’s no simple whodunit? Instead, think ‘The Long Goodbye’, ‘The Late Show’, ‘Chinatown’, ‘Night Moves’ or any early 70's inversion of the detective noir genre, where the gumshoe protagonist ultimately winds up investigating himself, navel-gazing so as to solve the ultimate mystery. ‘Skiptracing’ is Philip Marlowe driving around LA listening to Caetano Veloso or that deleted scene in John Cassavetes’s ‘The Killing of a Chinese Bookie’ where Cosmo Vitelli reads ‘Cosmic Trigger’.

In crafting ‘Skiptracing’, Mild High Club has made an album that strikes a balance between the known and unknown aspects of art and creation. While Brettin sought to have complete control over the creation of the previous album, in opening up and allowing these creative variables in, he learned a valuable lesson that lies at the heart of ‘Skiptracing’ itself: “When you wish upon the unknown, you might be surprised by the rewards.”

‘Skiptracing’ is out August 26 on Stones Throw Records via Inertia Music
Pre-Order: https://Inertia.lnk.to/mhc
For artwork or interview requests contact yingdi@inertia-music.com