Dehd announce third album, share “Bad Love”
15.02.2022 - 01:17
/ thefader.com
In just two LPs, Dehd have established an unmistakable style that would be most accurately described as post-devotional punk rock. Their songs are worshipful — supplicant, even — but rather than addressing an all-powerful deity, Emily Kempf and Jason Balla are singing to each other.
Today, they announced their third album, Blue Skies, out May 27 via Fat Possum, and shared its lead single, "Bad Love," along with a music video. Released near the end of Kempf and Balla's five-year romantic relationship, the tracks on Dehd's 2016 self-titled debut EP play like straightforward love songs, no matter what may have been going on behind the scenes.
Their first studio effort, 2019's Water, is a tragically upbeat breakup album (see the opening lines of "Lucky" — "Lucky to have / People in my life with the power to break my heart" — sung over Kempf's bouncy bass line, Balla's surf guitar, and a peppy drum beat from Eric McGrady. And its follow-up, Flower of Devotion, is less a reconciliation than a live processing of emotions that were too raw to fully articulate on the previous record.
Read Next: The 12 new albums you should stream right now Blue Skies was recorded in the same studio where the band made Flower, and that album's overwhelmingly positive critical reception allowed them to triple their stay this time, digging deep into their arrangements and textures to mine for new material. "Bad Love" is no major departure from the group's previous sound.
Rather, it's a fine-tuning — a slightly updated offering from a band that sees no need to to fix a product that isn't broken. “'Bad Love' is about recovering from love addiction and making a decision to stop choosing and aligning with people who aren’t your energetic match," Kempf
.