Run For Cover Records is excited to announce that they’ve signed sprawling cult independent band Self Defense Family. The band will release their debut LP for the label, titled Have You Considered Punk Music on June 29, 2018.
With over thirty releases under their name, Self Defense Family continues to become increasingly more like an actual extended family. The band maintains its revolving-door policy of members, with a consistent group of players at its core and a larger collection of musicians filtering in and out based on availability and need. This collective-like format allows for the band’s productive output to go on unhindered and seemingly without end. As the group expands and shifts, with its individual personas diverging as well, the Family acts as a constant for its members, a place to return to and work towards a collective musical effort.
Their latest full-length, Have You Considered Punk Music, finds the group at their decidedly most self-reflective, taking on popular mythologies and personal narratives from a lifetime in music as the album’s overarching themes. For this release, the band gathered in a Brooklyn studio over the course of a week, working together with engineer Taylor Young, perhaps best known for his work with metal bands. Following their usual process-based mode of writing and recording almost simultaneously, the resulting LP features an array of songs that feel tightly composed while maintaining the loose, spirited air of improvisational music. With ten songs that reflect the diverse musical interests of its members and their mutual affinity for repetitive post-punk, psychedelic rock, and various film scores, Have You Considered Punk Music documents a band further refining their own particular invention.
On their debut ralbum, vocalist Patrick Kindlon asks the listener to take a close look alongside him at the bottomless drive to create that he's spent his life exploring. "It’s about feeling very intensely about a thing you’re becoming increasingly aware the rest of the world doesn’t give a shit about,” says Kindlon. “It’s like how people feel about their cats: they love their cat, but you don’t give a shit about their cat.”
Today the band released the forthcoming record's title track alongside a podcast where vocalist Patrick Kindlon and guitarist Andrew Duggan do a deep dive into the making of and meaning behind the song. They also released a video for the track that can be seen here.
While the video and the track may at first seem incongruous, Kindlon explains that the parallels of owning a small business and making punk music aren't as far apart as one might think. He explains:
"We've never had the wherewithal to operate like a business. I think we got a band credit card a couple months ago, and I have no idea where it is currently. But since we started I've admired the bands that saw themselves as artists AND small business owners. Both require the strength to admit most people will never care the way you care. I can't have a boss. It's a personality defect; I recognize that. But there's a lotta people like me out here. I thought the video for our first single off Have You Considered Punk Musicwas a good space to highlight a kindred spirit."
The video for "The Supremacy of Pure Artistic Feeling" features the band's guitarist Mary Brulatour, who is also a Muy Thai fighter, and tells the story of her devotion to Muy Thai and the sacrifices that come with it.