[The Soup Nazi]

Here's what Alan told Uncut... last year, I guess, because it was published in the February 2021 issue, which must have been out late December 2020 or something:

For the last few records we've learned to put the vocals on early and put them in a place where you can't deny them. You're like, "OK, so how is the music going to step up and be where it needs to be?" Using the vocals as the anchor for that has been a little weird and risky, but I think it's working. It's a challenge. We're still trying to find sounds that we've never heard before, trying to find ways to depict rhythm without necessarily going to drums first. I've been playing more guitar lately, though it's more in an effort to make sounds that don't sound like guitar, finding other ways to use it. On a lyrical level, there's definitely a feeling of reaching. We're trying to actually touch the sky, not just expose it. Sometimes you reach for it and it disappears, and that's the sound that you capture. We're reaching for transcendence and trying to be cautious about escaping. We just wrote one song that we might record — the working title right now is "It's Not Broken, I'm Not Angry". A couple of the lines are memories of stirring underneath the car with my dad as a kid, trying to fix the transmission in the dark when it's 10 below zero. There's another called "Disappearing", which is kind of a tribute to living by the water. Where we live in Duluth, Lake Superior is big enough that there's a disappearing horizon, as if it was an ocean. It's weird. I like the idea of the unknown.

According to the magazine, the release date is "August" of this year. We'll see!