Written by: Dave Cantrell

In what’s been a quietly kept open secret for quite some time now, Brian Jonestown Massacre auteur Anton Newcombe has been working in Berlin with Toronto indie chanteuse Tess Parks for about a year now, sketching out slices of austere, almost baroque beauty without any of the fanfare of a BJM project. The duo, recording with engineer Fabien Leseure, have produced a handful of tracks for an album tentatively slated to be called “I Declare Nothing,” which at this point is still considered a ‘work in progress.’ The latest song leaked out of the studio is this stately beauty that suggests the sad, dissolute grandeur of Crime & the City Solution as fronted by Nico. Everything we’ve heard from these sessions boasts a similar wrecked elegance and SEM sincerely hopes the album finds its release some time this year. We tend to like it when our hearts are battered with a certain type of melancholia that brings to mind Nikki Sudden come back to life, and anyway, we’re all keen to pencil the album into our end-of-year lists.