Chris Farren Tickets

Ask Chris Farren how he feels when he finishes an album and he won’t hesitate to respond with: “Miserable. Miserable. Miserable. Looking back on those records... I have no good memories of making them, it’s always been a lonely, doubt-ridden process.” 

It’s surprising to hear this, knowing Farren’s reputation as a prolific songwriter who made his name recording with Jeff Rosenstock in Antarctigo Vespucci and before that, the Floridian punk band Fake Problems. In 2014, Farren started releasing music under his own name all while continuing his project with Rosenstock and his first album, Like a Gift From God or Whatever endeared him to fans of the now-defunct Fake Problems and new listeners. After releasing Born Hot in 2019, Farren knew he needed to make changes to the creative process. Enter Frankie Impastato, who Farren met on tour and who became one of his dearest friends. He told Impastato about the misery and together they hatched a plan to make Farren’s next album together. So, Farren got in touch with multi instrumentalist/producer Melina Duterte who invited him by her studio where she’s collaborated with a steady stream of notable artists since 2020. That’s where Doom Singer, his new full-length album due out 4th August would be made. 

Collaboration not only untethered Farren from his misery (fun was had) but also his overbearing need to control every aspect of the creative process. While on previous albums Farren might’ve spent hours tweaking a single drumbeat, Impastato’s live drums offer a spontaneity that breathed new dimensionality into the project. He wanted this new effort to be “bombastic”, to sound like it could fill the immense negative space of an arena. You hear that impulse on lead single “Cosmic Leash”, which opens with a wall of sound that careens to a halt, as Farren delivers his interlude over the slight strumming of a guitar, before the enormous chorus shreds through the silence. The choruses on Doom Singer are all huge, cathartic, catchy as hell and inspired by what Farren describes as the “sixties-tinged girl group vibe, not retro, but playful” employed by Belle and Sebastian. “First Place” is a song Farren describes as being about worrying you might grow apart from your partner. It’s hard to describe the single as anything but “jaunty”, the buoyancy of Farren’s delivery belying any sense of disquiet humming beneath its surface. 

Farren says Doom Singer communicates an “optimistic nihilism,” and that lyrically, he’s trying to embrace nuances inspired by films like TÁR and I’m Thinking of Ending Things. Against certainty, Doom Singer opens with a confession. “I don’t remember how to do this”, Farren croons on “Bluish”, admitting to feeling co-dependent in his marriage, worried he is too much to manage, that his neuroses might disrupt a delicate domestic balance. It was the first song he wrote for the album and the one that determined its narrative course. We’re made to believe aging makes you wiser, but as Farren has grown into the prodigious songwriter you hear on Doom Singer, he’s only grown less certain. “I’m constantly processing the way I feel about things, and I didn’t want any of these songs to sound sure of themselves, or to communicate any clear message,” he says. 

Citing My Bloody Valentine, TV on the Radio and Camera Obscura as clear influences, Farren says he can’t listen to much music until it’s time to make a new record, but when it’s time, he submerges himself in music that moves him. The final cut is as genuine, empathetic, and of course, funny, as Farren is, and though he claims nihilistic tendencies, it’s the dogged optimism that endures. On “All We Ever”, Farren compiles a list of things he wants (to stop paying rent, to love the government, to get drunk with friends) that accumulate into a three-minute reminder that no life is ever pristine, that there will always be wants unfulfilled, and that’s okay.