A hard band is good to find. Or so say some mysterious Instagram story posts by Stephen Malkmus, Matt Sweeney, Jim White, and Emmett Kelly, who seem to have found each other for a new, not-officially announced project.
UPDATE: They now are official and have a band name.
These four are connected, though they haven’t all played together before. Malkmus and Matt Sweeney (Chavez, Swan) worked together on Malkmus’ 2020 album Traditional Techniques, which they never really got to tour thanks to the pandemic, and both spent time in Endless Boogie and Soldiers of Fortune; Emmett Kelly (Ty Segall, etc) and Jim White (Dirty Three, Xylouris White, etc) have made music as The Double and played with Bonnie Prince Billy alongside Sweeney. Jim White alone has at least a half dozen active projects going.
This would be Malkmus’ first new music since the Pavement reunion, which is still going.
Stereogum points out the four musicians began sharing a few different stories, featuring candid photos of the four, on Tuesday, and at this point it’s as if the photos never started on any single account, they’re all just reposts, which adds to the mystery.
There’s also a slide that says “A hard band name is good to find” with a picture of notebook paper featuring such potential band names as NGO Poverty Pimps, Iron Chad, The Blue Jackets, Rubix and the Cubes, Snow Icicles, The Meat Subs and more.
We’ll have to wait and see how this all shakes out, but in the meantime you can check out screencaps of those various IG stories below.
