Gift Announce New Album, “Frenzy For The Thrill”, Out January 15, 2027 On Captured Tracks; Watch The Video For Lead Single, “Hand To The Flame”

GIFT—the project led by TJ Freda and comprising Jessica Gurewitz (synths/vocals/guitar), Kallan Campbell (bass), Justin Hrabovsky (synths/guitar), and Gabe Camarano (drums)—announce their new album, "Frenzy For The Thrill", out January 15th, 2027, on Captured Tracks, and release the lead single/video, “Hand To The Flame.”

GIFT began in earnest during the pandemic, with Freda holed up in Brooklyn building the lush layers of what would become the band’s 2022 debut Momentary Presence. Momentary Presence and its 2024 successor Illuminator blended various strains of psychedelic music — krautrock, new wave, electronic, shoegaze — while cataloguing Freda’s battles with panic attacks, most often seeking to counter anxiety with transcendence. Yet in the time before "Frenzy For The Thrill", Freda found that particular metaphorical drug was no longer working. He gravitated towards grittier, angstier inspirations like ‘90s alt-rock, grunge, and brasher iterations of electronic music. Combined with the band having become a unit honed by rigorous touring, Freda wanted to create something more visceral and collaborative. The sound of "Frenzy For The Thrill" became one of five musicians diving into the madness together.

The tours behind Illuminator had left Freda ragged. When a friend offered to let him stay at their house in Los Angeles for two months, it seemed a perfect way to decompress, to take time and write songs for other people and put GIFT to the side for a bit. Instead, Freda arrived in Los Angeles as they tamed the final fires of early 2025, to a house full of ash and otherwise not much more than the instruments he brought with him. Moved by the renewal he saw in Angelenos coming together in the wake of the fires, Freda suddenly felt a creative outpouring.

New GIFT songs arrived, more angst-ridden than in the past, yet not without their own sense of release. They were vehicles in which Freda asked large, existential questions: Now entering his thirties, he had watched friends settle down, and yet found he was not done searching. “Making Frenzy For The Thrill was partially about exploring the balance of living as an artist without disappearing into it.” From despondence, Freda emerged with a revitalized sense of creative purpose and direction.

Willfully seeking contrast and contradiction across "Frenzy For The Thrill", Freda made GIFT’s most band-oriented album yet, but also sought out electronic producer Teddy Mars, the mastermind behind Samples From Mars. With he and Freda sharing production duties, GIFT adopted the ethos and structure of dance music, but with the rest of the band contributing more than ever before. Harnessing the immediate energy GIFT had cultivated onstage while also incorporating more of their individual instincts in arrangement and songwriting, "Frenzy For The Thrill" still bears the far-seeing melodies and synth textures of GIFT’s past now anchored by the band’s most muscular performances yet.

Today’s single “Hand To The Flame” provided a skeleton key to the album. The track is an aesthetic meeting point of big beats, heavier guitars, and trippy synths, while also taking inspiration from the famed hubris parable of Icarus. Fire became a crucial organizing image for Freda as he considered the border between ambition and ego, the pitfalls of obsession, and the idea of cleansing one’s past by letting it all go up in smoke.

TJ comments, “‘Hand To The Flame’ is holding onto passion, and what makes us human while the world falls apart. Desperately chasing passion in a passionless world. Like charging full speed towards something you know will eventually hurt you. Repeatedly putting your hand in the flame with the same outcome, knowing it will always be the same outcome but hoping it will be different. There's romance in the chase, regardless of whether or not its going to hurt when you get to the end.”

There are lessons learned by the end of "Frenzy For The Thrill", a sort of self-acceptance on the other side of the album’s violence. A healthier, more balanced life after staring into the void. “We’re always looking for resolutions, but life isn’t like that,” Freda concludes. “Frenzy For The Thrill is about still being in love with the chase knowing we might not find answers on the other side. This is the sound of us crashing headlong into the unknown.”

PRE-ORDER/ PRE-SAVE “FRENZY FOR THE THRILL” HERE!

LISTEN TO “HAND TO THE FLAME” HERE!

"Frenzy For The Thrill" Tracklist

1. See The Heavens

2. Hand To The Flame

3. The Fly

4. Every Step

5. Instant Rush

6. Come Back Down

7. Higher Than The Knife

8. I Wanna Be A Toy

9. I Wish I Met You In Another Life

10. Into Oblivion

11. Demon Inside