About Saintseneca's Such Things
Saintseneca’s powerful new album Such Things is the band’s most cohesive, catchy and accessible output, and a work that solidifies the group’s singer and songwriter Zac Little’s status as one of modern indie music’s most thoughtful and talented artists. The record is available now via Anti-.
The first single, “Sleeper Hold” is a pulsating and infectious rock song that utilizes elements of punk, folk and straight up rock and roll, all centered around a soaring and beautifully anthemic chorus.
Such Things is the anticipated follow up to Saintseneca’s acclaimed album Dark Arc, which Stereogum celebrated writing, “Dark Arc shines in all the ways Saintseneca always has — gorgeous harmonies, rampant strumming, glimpses of both humanity’s fragility and power — but it also finds the band branching out into fuller arrangements and wilder instrumentation. (Wilder, even, than the plastic trash can they used to beat on.) It’s what an underground folk band stepping into the spotlight should sound like.”
Moving away from the cinematic, linear quality of Dark Arc, Little sought even higher ground for the new songs, and to incorporate the synapses and charges of his fellow members. “I was pushing myself with Such Things to try to explore the pop motif further, to try to use and bend that formula of having a groove, a beat, locking in and using that as scaffolding to build a song,” he says. “And even though it oftentimes might seem like this singular vision, at the core my creative strategy for the band is one that inherently involves other people. I think the best work I’ll make involves working that way.”
Those disparate pieces and parts have come together, like so many molecules, to form a solid rock object called Such Things. You can hold it in your hands and hear it in your head, this culmination of tiny, beautiful moments and fluctuations of energy and information, compressed and etched into an LP sleeve and eternity and all tied up in a rock and roll record.
“It’s definitely a new way of songs manifesting, and it feels like a step forward,” Little says. “I’m gonna push myself and try this thing I’ve wanted to try. I think it’s the best thing we’ve done so far, but then again I won’t write a song that I don’t think isn’t the best thing I’ve done. When I finish it I have to feel like it’s the best thing I’ve made. And if I don’t feel that way, it’s like, why bother?”