Today's Song of the Day, as chosen by Larry Mizell, Jr., host of The Afternoon Show on KEXP, is "All Roads Lead to Los Angeles" by High Pulp, from the 2022 album Pursuit of Ends on ANTI-.
With today's Song of the Day, Seattle's experimental jazz septet High Pulp share a sneak preview of their forthcoming full-length Pursuit Of Ends, which will be released April 15th via ANTI- Records. The album draws inspiration from "bebop, punk rock, shoegaze, hip-hop, and electronic music," and came together in spite of the pandemic.
“Having to start working remotely actually allowed us to try things that I don’t think we ever would have otherwise,” keyboard player Rob Homan says in a press release. “The process enabled us to walk the line between our more freewheeling, improvisatory jazz instincts and our more highly composed, electronic impulses, and what we ended up with was a really satisfying balance between the individual and the collective.”
“We’re a bunch of outsiders who refused to be kept out,” adds drummer Bobby Granfelt. “We’ve never had an academic approach to jazz as most of us grew up playing in DIY bands, so it was the rawness and the energy and the absolute freedom of the music that called to us in the first place.”
Check out the video below (directed by Sara Jade Alfaro and starring Zaahira Joseph), and revisit the band's 2020 in-studio performance, filmed before the global shut-down.
