FUCK YOU, TAMMY!Β – “SYCAMORE TREES”
A SPILL EXCLUSIVE VIDEO PREMIERE
Today, F*ck You, Tammy! release their new single “Sycamore Trees”. This track features layered guitars and ethereal vocals, creating a haunting ambiance that draws listeners in. The melody intertwines with powerful riffs, adding to the gripping emotional weight of the song.
Devery on the track, “Our live arrangement developed over years of playing shows, and had grown into something so beautiful that it made me have to make this record. “You take me for a walk/ under the sycamore trees” is, to me, about being led into a space of potentially terrifying or sublime transformation, much like the experience of entering world of a Lynch film: I wanted the song to be that invitation, and it’s the portal to the world of the rest of the record. I envisioned the expansiveness of a Bond theme with the menace of Portishead – and instead of being in the hermetic space of the Red Room, I wanted you to follow her into the dark woods, and there she encounters the saxophone solo- the ghostly presence that is waiting for her. The layered guitars and meticulously controlled feedback with the synths evoke the dark woods – the grand piano, the stars overhead and far, far away. The original is beautiful and feels like someone telling a sad and terrible story – ours is that story unfolding in real time.”
Listening to “Sycamore Trees” transports you to a mysterious unsettling place, you lose your points of reference and only have the voice to guide you further into the unknown. We love Devery’s reading of Jimmy Scott’s vocals, the way gender roles are rebuilt and intertwined. We start in a dark hallway, and suddenly hear “I got idea man”: the monitor switches on and this voice from another place pulls you down the rabbit hole.
Our initial point of reference was Lee Friedlander’s 1960’s photographs of television screens in motel rooms – there’s a Lynchian quality to this series in the way they anonymously transmit pop iconography, there is a darkness and omnipresence in these images. Hearing the track for the first time we immediately thought of Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter – a menacing, meditative unraveling into the abyss, drowning in the ominous starry night sky, floating through the seaweed and being weighed further and further down into the void. Lastly, we referenced Julee Cruise’s Floating Into the Night cover art; she is a revered voice in the Lynchian universe that we wanted to include in homage.
Fuck You, Tammy!
Sycamore Trees EP
(Independent)
Release Date: November 1, 2024