The Stroppies have announced their new album, ‘Levity’, will arrive on May 6 via London’s Tough Love Records.
To coincide, the band have shared lead single ‘The Perfect Crime’; it combines the Melbourne outfit’s idiosyncratic pop leanings with a delightfully off-kilter sense of experimentation. Underpinned by a repeated, machinelike vocal sample, the track slowly unfurls around it with jangly, lightly fuzzed-out guitars, buoyant rhythms and subtle harmonies, steadily building in intensity throughout.
‘The Perfect Crime’ arrives alongside a lo-fi video filmed by the band themselves. Check that out below:
‘Levity’ will follow on from the band’s ‘Look Alive!’ EP, which landed back in 2020 and followed debut album ‘Whoosh’ a year earlier. Since then, they’ve also added Zoe Monk of Thibault and Eggy to the fold on synth and guitar. Monk joins founding members Angus Lord and Claudia Serfaty, along with longstanding drummer Rory Heane.
“The restrictions around COVID really informed the way we made the record,” Lord expressed in a statement. Heane echoed the sentiment, adding: “There was a lot less opportunity to meet and build ideas collaboratively, which is how we’ve worked in the past.
“Instead, ideas were developed in isolation, then shared digitally, developing slowly over correspondence and only bearing fruit when we were able to be in a room together. I think this had a big effect on the songwriting and execution.”
Serfaty, meanwhile, explained how the album’s title was informed by the approach taken to writing the songs that feature on it: “The world feels strange and in turn making pop music feels even stranger. A healthy dose of levity had to be employed in order to find meaning in the process.”