LA’s MOMMA ANNOUNCE NEW ALBUM TWO OF ME OUT JUNE 5
DANGER COLLECTIVE RECORDS
LA’s Momma, a four-piece led by co-singers/guitarists/songwriters Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten, have today announced their new album Two of Me is set for release on June 5th, 2020 via Danger Collective Records. The Ambar Navarro-directed video for first single “Double Dare” premiered recently and can now be watched via YouTube HERE. Friedman and Weingarten explain “Double Dare” and its accompanying visual “tell the story of two lovers who go to a county fair, where they eventually run into trouble with some suburban teens. The boy engages in a fight, which ultimately leads to him being sent to an underground purgatory, known as the Bug House. We allude to these characters several times throughout the album, so if you look through the lyrics you may find some more connections.” Momma recently played their first ever NYC show supporting Empath and are confirmed to make their SXSW Music Festival debut this March; more shows will soon be announced. Two of Me is available for pre-order HERE.
As a band, Momma has always relied on Friedman (21) and Weingarten’s (22) symbiotic writing style and creative intuition. “I remember the title, Two of Me, originally came from this creative day Etta and I were having together,” Weingarten recalls. “Etta said something like, ‘It’s crazy—being alone with you is like being alone with myself.’ It references that feeling and encapsulates how we write together: a form of communication, where we’ll constantly switch off who is playing lead and who is playing rhythm guitar in the same song.” Inspired by songwriters like Kim Deal, Liz Phair, and Elliott Smith, the two developed a knack for dynamic song structure and gripping lyrics fused by a dulcet pop sensibility.
Although the pair now live far from home and each other while finishing college in New York and New Orleans, Friedman and Weingarten have continued to write the same way they always have. For the past two years, during breaks between semesters, the two would assemble DIY west coast tours, open LA dates for bands like Gang of Four and Ian Sweet, and workshop new songs together at home. The band’s debut album Interloper and 2018’s Apollo 7” capture Friedman and Weingarten hitting a stride at the end of their adolescence, while establishing a sound and vision that they continue to expand upon via the more focused and detailed world found within Two of Me. Over the course of several writing sessions—often months apart—the two wrote one song after another, slowly piecing together the story of an alternate reality they called “The Bug House.”
Two of Me is an ambitious concept album made up of fictional vignettes dealing with morality, youth, and punishment, that Friedman and Weingarten have populated with tragic heroes from their imagination. “The Bug House represents this sort of underground purgatory or hell that people are sent to as punishment,” Weingarten explains. “Two of Me’s songs are about coming to terms with the side of you within yourself that is maybe capable of darker things.” Momma’s second full length unfolds like a small town drama, where characters like video stringers and young lovers experience poetic justice in carnivalesque settings, detailed through Friedman and Weingarten’s illustrative lyrics. “It’s cool to have this world to go to that just belongs to Allegra and I, that we can both work on and revisit while we’re living in separate places,” Friedman notes.
Two of Me was recorded in Los Angeles with producer/engineer Aron Kobayashi Ritch, who bolstered Friedman and Weingarten’s desire to experiment with deeper and more distorted sounds, along with drummer Zach CapittiFenton and bass player Sebastian Jones, who made up the rhythm section for most of the album’s tracks.
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Background Photo Credit: Matthew James-Wilson
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