Premiere: Strawberry Moon Provide Thrilling Solace On New Album, Habitual Creatures
“We cherish the old and seek out the new.”
This declaration comes a minute into “Magnolia Tree,” the gripping opening track from Strawberry Moon’s newest album Habitual Creatures. Delivered with conviction from singer Katie Bowles overtop a tense groove, it’s a bold line that subtly reveals the appeal of this thrilling collection of songs. Here, the four-piece band expand upon older inspirations and influences as well as their own past work to create something new and exciting. It’s a musical triumph for everyone involved, and one we at The Auricular are proud to premiere a day before its official release through local label Sockhead Records.
Musically, Habitual Creatures plays out as a modern escalation of classic post-punk sounds. Bowles’ voice provides a rich timbre that helps fill and expand the cavernous sound of each song as the instruments furtively work on pensive grooves and brooding melodies in the background. Guitar lines from Liam McElroy are sharp and nimble, coming across comforting and penetrating within a single song like on “Magnolia Tree” where he provides a delicate solo melody mere seconds after delivering an ear-splitting strum on the chorus. Drummer TJ Meade provides much more than a steady beat for the band, helping them traverse the rippling grooves and temperamental tempos like on the shaky but assured track “Creatures Of Habit” that the album derives it’s name from. The bass work of Gray Stephenson sets the tone for most of the songs on the record, either by providing hesitant bass notes on “Outshine Everything” or a tumbling bass line on “Control” that falls in the erratic line of succession with “Taxman” by The Beatles and “Start!” by The Jam.
Those legendary groups are not the only ones that come to mind when listening to this music. The sounds of Joy Division and Gang Of Four float throughout the music, as do modern day iconoclasts like Savages and Screaming Females. Katie Bowles’ own voice carries the punch of Siouxsie Sioux and the poise of Grace Slick, whether she is gently gliding on “Goodbye” or forcefully bellowing on “In My Book.” Even the lyrics seem to build on works from the past, with “Anxiety In The Grocery Store” offering a new vision for The Clash’s “Lost In The Supermarket.” Here, the band trades disorientation for dread in the land of consumerism with an abrasive confrontation, as opposed to the somber reflection of the 1979 classic song. Cherish the old and seek out the new indeed.
The genesis of this band and its sound provides a great deal of depth to Habitual Creatures as well. Katie Bowles first released music under the name Strawberry Moon back in early 2017 via a six-song bedroom pop EP that was described as being “recorded in a tiny bedroom on a cracked & dying laptop.” The sound was nebulous and granular, but would start to solidify by the time Bowles released Dust Bath in 2018. Here, the sound of Strawberry Moon began to intrigue, but there was still a huge valley between its reverb washed aesthetic and the propulsive sound of Habitual Creatures. In 2020, the current iteration of Strawberry Moon truly began to take shape with the current line-up joining Bowles on Spring Demos, which offered a lo-fi vision of three songs that would find their way onto the new album. Two months later, Bowles released Quarantine Songs, a trio of solo loop tracks that harken back to the bedroom origins of the project. Each of those songs would also end up on Habitual Creatures in completely different versions, reimagined and reworked by the band as a collaborative force that establishes Habitual Creatures as the true debut album for Strawberry Moon. The end result is a sound that doesn’t shy away from that past intimate music recorded on a sputtering computer. It instead pulls from that intimate, visceral appeal and re-shapes it to fit the deeply resonant sound the band now expertly yields, further cementing that opening mantra.
Later in the album on “Creatures Of Habit”, Bowles offers a counter-point to this ethos though. “We are habitual creatures / Eyes wide shut to the future” she melodically asserts as the band buzzes around her in one of the record’s more exciting moments. At first glance, it reads as a repudiation of that initial declaration, but truthfully, it’s just an alternate observation of the same philosophy. We can’t just bounce around different sounds and styles without any type of direction. We need to remember where we came from and fully understand it so we can discover where we were meant to go next. This line of thinking feels realized on the album’s closing statement on “You, Me, And Mystery,” a twinkling twee jaunt that contrasts the other ten preceding tracks. Vocals still loom large here, the bass still sets the stage, the drums still guide the listener along, and the guitar still offers a palate of emotions. It sounds familiar despite being tonally different from the rest of the record because it matches that thematic refrain. It harkens back to the core of what made Strawberry Moon appealing in the first place while reimagining it as a collaborative effort from four skilled musicians that are pushing the sound to new, exciting places. It’s all part of the same journey. We just have to keep in mind exactly where we started.
Cherish the past. Seek out the new. It’s what Strawberry Moon set out to do on Habitual Creatures and exactly what this tremendous album accomplishes with a truly sensational sound.
Habitual Creatures comes out Friday, October 21st on all streaming platforms, as well as cassette tapes released through local label Sockhead Records. Pre-save the album now via DistroKid (link here) and keep an eye out on the Bandcamp pages for Strawberry Moon (link here) and Sockhead Records (link here) for the cassette tapes.
Strawberry Moon is celebrating the release of Habitual Creatures the evening of Friday, October 21st alongside Destructo Disk and TY Sorrell at Cobra Cabana on the corner of Marshall and Goshen. Tickets are $5 with a start time at 8 PM. Check out the show flyer below.
