New York, NY (Top40 Charts) GRAMMY Award-nominated trio The Record Company today announced the release of The 4th Album, the band's new full-length offering and 2023 debut for
Round Hill Records, set for release on
September 15th.
When The Record Company pick up their instruments, the members - Chris Vos (guitar, lead vocals, harmonica), Alex Stiff (bass, backing vocals), and Marc Cazorla (drums, backing vocals) participate in a musical back-and-forth akin to a formative and supportive conversation among siblings. The nuances of their personalities seep through loose, bluesy guitar leads, airtight drum grooves, thick bass, and vividly evocative lyrics.
With such fluidity, the musicians respond to one another so instinctually you'd swear they were telepathically linked. However, there's no such superpower necessary when you've got the closest thing to a brotherhood that three musicians unrelated by blood can share…
At 2pm on the final day of business for the music industry in 2022, The Record Company got a telephone call from the head of their label, who'd been sitting on their new demos for months while the band sat in limbo. It was a scene out of a movie about the bad luck bands sometimes have with big record labels: a pleasant "hello" led to a Charlie Brown's teacher murmur that amounted to "you're dropped from the label, Happy Christmas, fellas."
"It was tough to swallow," says TRC bassist and in-house producer Alex Stiff, "because we had already set out to write the most stripped-back and raw record we'd done in years, and they had demos of this new music, and ultimately dropped us. Combine that with some new economic realities, a canceled tour, and we really felt like everything was crashing down at once."
On The 4th Album, The Record Company see that rejection as a rite of renewal, a way to cleanse themselves, to start over. They head back to their roots: creating the raw, self-produced, blues-based music that in past years earned them two #1 songs at AAA radio, a Grammy nomination and brought them from playing small clubs to arena tours supporting
John Mayer and Bob Seger.
Talking about the making of the album, Alex Stiff says: "The only way to make this record was to go back to basics. We still had the cheap recording gear from our first album including the garage sale drum set, but we had to find the songs and the spirit. We dug really deep on the songwriting, which captures where we were emotionally during this time (between record labels).
If the lyrics were gonna be raw and honest, the music needed to be as well. We put away fancy production tricks and click tracks in favor of a more stripped-back approach. That was the general theme of this record, to keep the music raw. It's a return to form in a way, but we're still growing."
The Record Company have experienced everything as a family since forming back in 2011. Along the way, they served up a tested-and-proven epic in the form of their 2016 debut, Give It Back To You. The release earned a GRAMMY® Award nomination in the category of "Best Contemporary Blues Album" and spawned the single "Off The Ground," which reached #1 at AAA
Radio and tallied nearly 40 million total streams and counting.
Beyond a string of stunning late-night television appearances and an extensive tour with
John Mayer (in addition to headlining coast-to-coast), the band maintained this momentum with 2018's All Of This Life and in 2021 they released Play Loud.
Late In 2021, the guys hunkered down and commenced creating what would become their fourth LP. Working out of an intimate home studio in Beachwood Canyon, they wrote, recorded and self-produced the music. Outside of cutting drums at the legendary Sunset Sound, it proved to be a homegrown affair through and through.
The Record Company 's new single "
Talk To Me" was released on June 23rd and is currently #4 on the AAA charts. The song features a bass that practically dances atop a simmering groove, punctuated by tambourine before the guitar kicks back in as Chris urges, "So, why don't you talk to me?"
Stiff says about the song, "A common theme on this record was keeping the sound raw and back-to-basics. With 'Talk To Me,' we used the same junky yard sale drum set heard on our earliest recordings. When the question came up later whether to re-record the song in a more professional studio setting, we voted that the original spirit was more important than polish, and we left that groove intact. A lot of The 4th Album follows this same vision."
The second single from the band, "Dance On Mondays" features guitar cries through a hypnotically hummable bassline and head-nodding beat. The chantable hook instantly takes hold with grit and gusto as Chris affirms, "I don't dance on Mondays."
"Somebody asked me to go see a band on a Monday night, and I just said, 'I don't dance on Mondays'," Alex recalls. "I wrote it down in my phone. The phrase signifies, 'I'm taking my life back, and I'm not going to dance for anybody."
Other songs on the album include "I Found
Heaven (In My Darkest Days)," "Highway Lady," "Patterns," "Roll With It," "Bad Light," "Control My
Heart Blues," "I'm Working," and "You Made A Mistake."
"I'd love for people to hear this record and feel like they're in the house with us making it," Alex leaves off. "I want them to feel like they're part of this unpolished and homemade thing, because that's what we were trying to get back to."
"We're a trio, and that's the completion of this circle," TRC drummer Marc Cazorla concludes. "The fourth member of this group is the space between us. We embrace that space as part of the raw element. That's what we explored on this album, and it's beautiful. We can't wait to bring it on the road."
TOUR DATES
Sep 02 - Peoria Blues and Heritage Fest - Peoria, IL
Sep 15 - Telluride Blues & Brews - Telluride, CO
Oct 04 - Guild Theatre - Menlo Park, CA
Oct 05 - HopMonk Tavern Novato - Novato, CA
Oct 06 - Goldfield Trading Post - Roseville, CA
Oct 07 - Old Princeton Landing - El Granada, CA
Oct 25 - The Vogue - Indianapolis, IN
Oct 26 - Green Bay Distillery - Green Bay, WI
Oct 27 - High Noon Saloon - Madison, WI
Oct 28 - The Fillmore Minneapolis -Minneapolis, MN
