Since their inception in the mid-2000s, Anamanaguchi have delivered chiptune anthems that sounded as if they were spawned inside a dust-covered Super Nintendo. For their latest album, Anyway, out today via Polyvinyl, the NYC four-piece decided to shake up their routines, hard. Instead of swapping files over the internet, they wrote songs with vocal parts, in the same room, for the first time, conceived inside the American Football house in Champaign, Illinois (memorialized on the album cover and featured in the video for the ’90s-leaning lead single “Darcie”). Ultimately, the band brought their Anyway demos to former Mercury Rev bassist Dave Fridmann (MGMT, Sleater-Kinney), who helped them record to tape using vintage analog equipment at his Tarbox Road Studios in upstate New York. You can hear them push the boundaries of their 8-bit sound in myriad ways, from the slacker rock of “Buckwild” to the caustic “Rage (Kitchen Sink).”
“The Clash just kept coming up in all these interesting ways,” guitarist/vocalist Peter Berkman tells AP. “There’s a breaking point in [‘Rage’]. It turns from this Joe Strummer-ish thing into something more urgent, and we managed to shout out Fortnite.”
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“I was thinking very specifically in the studio about one of my favorite bands, Crass, and the way that they use not just distortion but effects to simulate the horrors of war and overall fear,” drummer Luke Silas adds. “They were using it to signify a thread of nuclear disaster, so that blowup at the end of ‘Rage,’ the track collapsing in on itself, [is influenced by them].”
The band will head out on a lengthy headlining tour in the fall, running throughout September and October. Before they hit the road, the band told us the story of every song on Anyway.