The Vacant Lots release single/video 'Damaged Goods' ahead of new LP

Following a premiere on Iggy Pop’s BBC 6 Music show, Brooklyn-based duo The Vacant Lots are officially sharing their new single ‘Damaged Goods’ today. Arriving off the back of recent single ‘Amnesia’, it’s a piece of minimalist post-punk/synth-pop lifted from the band’s fifth studio album ‘Interiors’, out October 13th on Fuzz Club. Watch the video, directed by Alexander Schipper, here: https://youtu.be/baeXY9b6h7k

“Damaged Goods is about integrating conflicting internal feelings. If you're saying you need an exit strategy and one lifetime is enough, that’s a whole other zone you're going to. On this album, I wanted to dig deeper than I had done before and really carve out the pain”, Jared Artaud says of the new single: “In Damaged Goods lines from other songs on the record are referenced and contrasted. We did this a lot on Interiors. I like how all the songs can interrelate with one another, and it gives this song and the album another layer of intimacy, depth and closeness.”

Youtube link: https://youtu.be/baeXY9b6h7k

The 8 songs on ‘Interiors’ synthesise all The Vacant Lots’ past work while pushing forward into the future. It’s Jared Artaud and Brian MacFadyen’s darkest and most visionary work yet. Ethereal metallic synths and blistering electronics are driven by disco-on-downers dance beats lashed with gutter-rock guitar riffs and icy detached vocals with evocatively concise and lacerating lyrics. “I like writing songs you can dance or zone out to”, Artaud says: “That duality of individual listening and music played in a crowd has always attracted me. A cross between the club and headphones. Music for loners and lovers.”

Recorded over many sleepless nights and amphetamine-fueled mornings in the project’s isolated Brooklyn bunker home studios, ‘Interiors’ goes deeper into the band’s minimal is maximal aesthetic, with nods to 70s/80s punk and nightclub music ala Joy Division, Iggy Pop’s The Idiot, Depeche Mode, and New Order. The album sees The Vacant Lots team up once again with Maurizio Baggio (The Soft Moon, Boy Harsher) on mixing duties, who also worked on the band’s last two albums, ‘Closure’ (2022) and ‘Interzone’ (2020).

Long-time supporter of the band and godfather of punk Iggy Pop perhaps perfectly articulated The Vacant Lots’ ethos when spinning the band on his BBC 6 Music show: “I like The Vacant Lots. They try a number of things to just make a musical mood. They’re really not going for ‘this is pop’ or ‘this is dance’ or ‘yeah man rock n roll’ or whatever it is. They just create a nice mood wherever they go.”