SAN FERMIN – “YOUR GHOST”
A SPILL EXCLUSIVE MUSIC PREMIERE
Brooklyn-based indie rock band San Fermin — a duo composed of songwriter Ellis Ludwig-Leone and vocalist Allen Tate — share their brand new EP, Your Ghost, tomorrow via their own label, Better Company. The label, which Ludwig-Leone and Tate formed in 2020, has since seen releases from Wye Oak, Wild Pink, Sorcha Richardson, Pure Bathing Culture, Daisy the Great, and more.
On the record’s final single, the eponymous “Your Ghost,” Tate compares a day with the ghost of a partner to the (more complicated) real-life version. The lyrics are delivered over a cheery guitar riff and propulsive drums; both an indictment and a celebration of a complex relationship: “I make love to your ghost / When I dream about you.”
“I was noticing that when someone’s gone, their absence can take on a life of its own and become a presence in itself,” wrote Ludwig-Leone of their newest track. “You go through your day thinking about this person, what they would say in certain situations, how they would act. Their absence takes on all these personality traits that are more of a reflection of your feelings about them (and their absence) than the actual person.”
San Fermin’s music exists in a state of conflicted emotion. Lauded by The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino for his “knack for simultaneously expressing beauty and crisis,” Ludwig-Leone writes songs that shift seamlessly between joy and dread, panic and euphoria. Speaking on their new EP, Ludwig-Leone wrote:
“All three of these songs were an experiment with a new kind of writing style, which is I think the best part of writing an EP… it’s a chance to try things out and tweak your process without the pressure of making a whole body of work. I wrote these songs at the piano, thinking about them in a more bare bones way, like, could these songs be played on any instrument at any tempo and still hold up? I wanted them to have a classic feel, like they could exist in any era and still have resonance.”
San Fermin’s newest release, Your Ghost, is out tomorrow via Better Company. Stay tuned for more.
San Fermin
[Single]
(Better Company)
Release Date: September 8, 2022