Matt Berninger, Sharon Van Etten and Superchunk feature on new Crooked Fingers album, Swet Deth

"I dreamed of a beautiful, colossal, six-winged inamorata rising off the horizon above the ashes of the dying earth; arctic lasers pulsating from her eyes and fire streaming from her fingertips, freezing then melting then freezing everything again in an instant; lighting up the night with death and apocalypse, destroying everything in her path. When I woke I realized I had fallen deeply in love with her, but was worried that it was actually a trap, which - in hindsight - it clearly was," says Eric Bachmann, on "Cold Waves".

One afternoon, Eric Bachmann’s son returned home from school with a sheath of pictures he’d drawn, all of them macabre. “There were crows and sinister figures with scythes and tombstones,” he recalls, “and in the center, there was a strange, lush green tree growing out of all of this red and black. On one of them, he had written ‘DETH, SWET DETH,’ and everything clicked in my head,” he explains of Swet Deth, Bachmann’s first album under his Crooked Fingers moniker after a 15-year hiatus.

Hearing parts in these songs that called for instruments he didn’t play or vocals that weren’t in his register, he found himself expanding the roster of guest musicians further than he had on any album in his catalogue, including Sharon Van Etten (“Haunted”), The National’s Matt Berninger (“From All Ways”), and Superchunk’s Mac McCaughan (“Cold Waves”).

“I’m introverted, I’m shy, and I don’t want to waste anybody’s time,” Bachmann notes, “so it wasn’t the easiest thing to do. I had to follow the sound - the way a bassline drove through a song or the way a lyric would sound in another voice - and break through some of my own barriers to make it happen.”

Tracklist:

1. Cold Waves
2. From All Ways
3. Spray Tan Speed Queen (In a German Car)
4. Insomnia
5. Empty Love and Cheap Thrills
6. Haunted
7. Hospital
8. (I’m Your) Bodhisattva
9. Lena
10. Steady Now