After a few weeks of teasing, The Hard Quartet — the new group featuring Stephen Malkmus (Pavement), Matt Sweeney (Chavez), Jim White (Dirty Three) and Emmett Kelly (Ty Segall) — have officially announced themselves, shared their first single and announced shows in NYC, LA and London.
There’s still not a lot of hard facts about how these four came to make music together, though they’ve got many connections to one another, but Matador Records offers up this word salad in the press release: “A band, perhaps, can be thought of as a body, a corpus, in which physically discrete lifeforms comprise a chimera that shrieks with one voice. In this particular band, which is one of millions in the world today, four players selflessly merge, become musical, and emit rock ‘n’ roll that is familiar but new, warm but icy, melodic but Sphinx-like in its seductive and subtle riddles… essentially, The Hard Quartet has leveled, cultivated, and made lush an entirely new steppe in the ecosystem of guitar-bass-drums-voice agriculture.”
“Earth Hater” is The Hard Quartet’s debut single and and one point Malkmus asks “Can you dredge emotion from me?” over very skronky (but catchy) backing. You can watch the plasticine stop-motion animated video, which was directed by EYEDRESS, below.
The live shows happen in October: LA’s The Belasco on 10/10 with Papa M, NYC’s Webster Hall on 10/17 with Weak Signal, and London’s Electric Ballroom on 10/22 with The Tubs. Tickets go on sale Friday, August 2 at 10 AM local time.
The Hard Quartet – 2024 Tour Dates
Oct 10 – Los Angeles @ The Belasco
Oct 17 – New York @ Webster Hall
Oct 22 – London @ Electric Ballroom