Chromatics have been promising to release their Dear Tommy LP since December of 2014 when they first made the album’s tracklist available. The years have come and gone since but when Johnny Jewel‘s manager, Echo Park Records’ Alexis Rivera, revealed via Twitter in May of 2017 that the producer/multi-instrumentalist had destroyed all the copies of the record and pulled all previously released versions of coming tracks off the internet, I gave up hope the album would ever materialize.
However, it seems, according to Rivera’s same message, this is how Jewel likes to operate–having destroyed all copies of Kill For Love in 2011, before building it again from the ground up. Such, then, is Dear Tommy, destroyed sometime after Jewel had a near death experience in Hawaii on Christmas Day of 2015. However, the word is out this week that the album will be released sometime this coming Fall: “…same titles, same lyrics, same track order, as when it was announced Dec of 2014. Nothing’s changed except it’s better”–via Rivera’s Twitter.
To add to the mystery, Chromatics have a brand new song and video today, “Black Walls,” a track not on the aforementioned announcement. But that’s okay, as “Black Walls” finds the band distilling pure Chromatics’ magic. Melding their essential sense for Post-Punk tension with synth-pop sensibilities, the cut’s hair-raising use of negative space only accentuate it’s mysterious noir vibe, while vocalist Ruth Radelet turns “water to wine” with her spell-binding cool. The band stars in this self-directed video shot by Rene Hallen. Featuring starry-eyed disco glitz and the faded elegance of a by-gone era, we watch as the band plays on a foggy soundstage stuck somewhere back in an imagined time.
