Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever announce third album with lead single “The Way It Shatters”

Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever have announced their third studio album, Endless Rooms, by way of a jaunty new single titled “The Way It Shatters”.

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Released today (February 3), the new song shines with jangly, layered guitars, snappy drum fills and soaring vocal melodies. Despite its lively sonics, however, “The Way It Shatters” has dark lyrical undertones. So goes the chorus: “It’s desolation by rote / All around your home / If you were in the boat / Would you turn the other way? Lost in a magazine town / It’s all falling up again / And in my head, I tell myself / It’s all just a necessary evil.”

The track arrives with a music video helmed by Nick Mckk, with whom the Australian band had previously worked on the clips for Sideways To New Italy cuts “Cameo”, “Cars In Space” and “She’s There”. It taps into the album’s darker themes, Mckk said in a press release, expounding on the Groundhog Day-inspired concept.

“The new album has a night time feeling, so we wanted to explore shooting the whole thing from sundown,” he said. “Fran [Keaney, vocals/guitar] had the idea of revisiting memories, of resetting groundhog day style, but each time we come back the world is a little different. The attraction of light works as a narrative device, coaxing Joe into this house of memories, and back out again.”

Take a look at the video for “The Way It Shatters” below:

Endless Rooms is due out on May 6 via Ivy League / Sub Pop. The follow-up to 2020’s Sideways To New Italy, it’s been described by Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever as the band “doing what [they] do best: chasing down songs in a room together”.

Although they’ve never shied away from more story-based songwriting, the band have asserted that LP3 is “almost an anti-concept album”. On the background of the record’s title, the band noted that Endless Rooms is a nod to their “love of creating worlds in [their] songs”, saying they approach each track as if it were “a bare room to be built up with infinite possibilities”.