Gold Dime Announces LP "No More Blue Skies" + Shares Single/Video "Wasted Wanted"

Gold Dime Announces LP No More Blue Skies (out 10/20 via No Gold), Shares Lead Single and Video “Wasted Wanted”

No More Blue Skies is a revelation - a galvanizing record of bleak noir textures, the closest Ambro’s gotten to capturing the soundscape that lives inside of her head to date.

WATCH "WASTED WANTED"

Today Gold Dime announced their third LP, No More Blue Skies, out October 20th via Liars' Angus Andrew's new imprint No Gold. The art-rock project, headed by Andrya Ambro (Talk Normal), shared the album's lead single "Wasted Wanted."

On No More Blue Skies, the Queens-based composer and drummer's songs are widescreen and fiercely intense. Lead single "Wasted Wanted” feels like industrial swagger. It's campy, dark, and victorious. The song comes with a Godard-inspired video by Joe Wakeman that leans into the song's cacophonic and disparate elements.

Regarding the music, Andrya Ambro says: "The vibe of the song is about pursuing a direct line of communication in a superficial world; otherwise we’re left feeling wasted and wanting more. For this one, I took inspiration from Italian avant garde composer Egisto Macchi’s “Gli Imboscati” whose use of minimal repetitive drums act as both a guiding light and menacing reality. With that as the starting point, the guitars, like a broken machine, fill out the rhythm with moments of triumph. The vocal stylings of Annie Lennox in the Eurhythmics’ “4/4 in Leather” definitely found their way into the subconsciousness of this song - those vocals being an amalgamation of something sincere and urgent, but somehow still laugh in the face of this insufficient reality."

Regarding the video, film-maker Joe Wakeman says: "The concept for this video came both from a camera movement in Godard’s Contempt - a slow pan through dead space between a couple on opposite sides of the room - and from these retro Godzilla toys I had as a kid. The latter reminded me of the song’s sound and movement. Inspired by a Mike Kelley piece, Andrya introduced the concept of the dancers, as well as the timpani. And when you force all these things to fit together, it creates this visual cacophony that weirdly arrives at making some kind of unconscious sense."

ABOUT NO MORE BLUE SKIES

"Gold Dime's Andrya Ambro has a distinct knack for synthesizing punk's primitive energy, an avant-garde sensibility and catchy vocal lines." - Brian Chase (Yeah Yeah Yeahs)

"Album title with gloom perfectly appropriate to what we are all feeling, but listen for a minute or two and you start to notice a few shards of sunlight peeking through the impressively thick, dark wall of sound" - Greg Saunier (Deerhoof)

"Andrya Ambro is an incredible force on the drums. She's an inspiration as a performer and song writer but perhaps more importantly, and less translatable into wider success, she's a great person. Everything you'd want in a percussion idol!" - Kid Millions (ONEIDA)

Cinematic—is there a better word to describe Andrya Ambro’s songwriting? On No More Blue Skies, her third record as Gold Dime, the Queens-based composer’s songs are a widescreen, fiercely intense, hair standing up on the back of your neck kind of art rock. These songs are not for the faint of heart. Not pretty but beautiful, rigorous. Her drums are angular, darting off in unexpected directions. The guitars tremble and shake. When Ambro opens her mouth up to sing, her vocals are a call to arms. Dance, if you dare.

Before Gold Dime, Ambro was one half of the critically-acclaimed avant garde rock act Talk Normal. Her debut as Gold Dime was in 2017, Nerves, and it was the first time Ambro was able to focus fully on what kind of sounds she was most excited about. In the years that have followed, that sound has only continued to sharpen, crystalize. 2019’s My House was electric: guitars and drums crashed into each other, the textures were transfixing, unusual but totally intuitive. All of Ambro’s music is like this: forceful, compositionally rich and death-defying. Music that shouldn’t work but it does and for that reason it is glorious.

No More Blue Skies is a revelation - a galvanizing record of bleak noir textures, the closest Ambro’s gotten to capturing the soundscape that lives inside of her head to date. It is also the record that most closely captures the live show experience that is so essential to Ambro’s practice as an artist. Ambro’s background is as a drummer, she’s classically trained, studied jazz in school and went deep into West African percussion. Through Gold Dime, her inclinations as a drummer foreground the tapestries that are her songs. These songs are anchored in truly singular rhythms, percussion driven moments of songwriting that constantly subvert your expectations. Her voice - sometimes spoken like Laurie Anderson, sometimes sung in the provocative spirit of Diamanda Galas - acts as her fifth limb; both informing and interacting with the drums. On No More Blue Skies, she plays all the drums, sings, produces the samples and is at the helm of most of the record’s compositions. As a band, Gold Dime is a rotating ensemble, featuring Ambro’s talented friends that she’s connected with through the New York music scene for nearly two decades.

“Denise,” is a cliff dive into a pool of freezing cold water. Ambro’s percussion flickers like a strobe, Ian Douglas-Moore’s bass is meaty and heavy. The alto sax from Jeff Tobias is extraordinary, at some point something low, guttural, at other points a high-pitched wail. “Denise can’t go outside,” sings Ambro’s, “Oh, she might blow away.” The lyrics on all of the record are like this: abstracted, but in that abstraction there is a clarity, an unshakeable depth of emotion. “Wasted Wanted,” is a song of absolutely no bullshit. How you feel lost trying to interact with people who operate at such a surface level. At the start of the song, Ambro’s percussion almost sounds like someone throwing a basketball at a wall over and over again, a sort of fuck you in the sonics, an All work and no play kind of vibe. “We ride, resigned,” she sings.

No More Blue Skies is some of Ambro’s best songwriting to date. To quote Brian Chase of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “Andrya has a distinct knack for synthesizing punk's primitive energy, an avant-garde sensibility and catchy vocal lines.” It is the perfect live album that exists inside of her head, Gold Dime in its absolute highest resolution. The record was produced entirely by Ambro, and mixed alongside longtime collaborator Nicolas Vernhes. Ambro’s former Talk Normal bandmate and current Kim Gordon guitarist Sarah Register mastered the album. The result is an album that demands your full attention, at all times. Because it is that good.