There’s a tactile quality to Radiator, the debut album by Philadelphia band Sadurn, due May 6 via Run For Cover. What started out as a solo project for songwriter and vocalist Genevieve DeGroot is now a full band affair. On Radiator the group offer up intimate and lo-fi missives typified by stick melodies, lyrical honesty, and the sparsest of musical backdrops. The result is a collection of songs that feel as if they were written exclusively for you as you put in your headphones and press play over and over again.
Today the band is sharing "icepick," a song about a faltering relationship and how it oscillates between working really well and then not at all. DeGroot wonders whether this is enough, whether the bad times are canceled out by the good or not. It's a frank window into a private affair and comes with a video that is similarly revealing. Nothing much happens, just a camera tracking DeGroot as they make their way to play a basement show, but that same sense of closeness felt in the lyrics comes through with every shot.
"icepick" acts as both the penultimate and closing track on Radiator with the instrumental version of the song played in reverese, as if the band is trying to reverse time and travel back to a happier place. It's a touching and evocative moment on an album filled with such moments.
Speaking via email, DeGroot told The FADER: '"icepick" was a cathartic song to write and I didn’t think I would ever show it to anyone. That’s what makes it cathartic I guess. The process for this song was different than most of the others on the album, which are played live with the band - we started with the same spliced up Garageband beat from my original demo and laid down each synth and guitar track individually. The song was still pretty bare bones when we left the recording session, and months later Jon [Cox] and I were kind of hitting our heads against a wall trying to finish the arrangement. Honestly we almost gave up but it turned out to be something I'm really proud of. Jon added the shaker and some reverb-y guitar, I did the baritone uke fills and added the sample at the end, which was from a phone video of Amelia playing guitar. The ending of this song might be my favorite part of the record."
Sadurn will play:
04/10 Philadelphia @ PhilaMOCA
04/20 Somerville, MA @ The Rockwell
04/22 Hampshire, MA @ Hampshire College
04/25 Brooklyn, NY @ Purgatory
04/21 Providence, RI @ AS220
04/23 Round Top, NY @ Glen Falls House
05/12 Philadelphia, PA @ Johnny Brenda’s (Record Release Show)