Dance-punks Special Interest today reveal their highly anticipated third album Endure. Endure was self-produced and recorded at HighTower in New Orleans with engineering by James Whitten, mixed by Collin Dupuis (Angel Olsen, Yves Tumor, Lana Del Rey) and mastered by Matt Colton in London at Metropolis.
On every level, Special Interest is uncompromising: in their adventurous sound, their high-energy live performances, and their convictions. Dance music and punk culture have flirted in the warehouse before, but Special Interest’s desire to dismantle genre is informed by a larger abolitionist worldview that resists constraint, category, and conformity. Their music is a soundtrack to dancing the pain away as much as raging against the machine.
Brought together by New Orleans’ inventive DIY scene, Special Interest finds a new way of defining the “rock band,” a true collective unit rather than the dictated vision of a single member. Their sound is ever-fluid and continues to evolve — Special Interest began as the duo of Alli Logout and Maria Elena with guitar, drum machine, and a power drill, before Nathan Cassiani and Ruth Mascelli filled out its current line-up.
Special Interest describes the experience of recording Endure as “inverted,” since the pandemic stunted the possibilities of live performance, resulting in a new period of experimentation and sonic exploration in which old rules were cast out. Everything the group writes springs from the same source — a hard-hitting drum machine beat — but the possibilities are endless and the outcome always unpredictable. Ruth Mascelli’s work on drum machines and synthesisers provides a foundation, as varying beats lead the group into different directions: rave-ready drum and bass or ballroom-like house on the more dancefloor-friendly cuts, and marching kicks on No Wave-inflected tracks like ‘Foul’, while ‘Cherry Blue Intention’ brings a sturdy post-punk bassline, shrieking guitar effects, and a jungle breakbeat together into a driving anthem.
Release: November 4th, 2022, Rough Trade Records/Remote Control