Devon Church Shares the Stunning Opener From His New Album

Photography PHILISTINE DSGN

“There’s something about Leonard Cohen’s voice and lyrical sensibility that resonates with me on a whole other level,” Devon Church wrote in a feature about his former band Exitmusic earlier this year. “There’s this deep religious feeling in his music, which is soaked through with doubt and ambivalence and sensuality and depression, competing impulses which are ultimately resolved only by kneeling before beauty itself—the beauty of the world as it is, as ugly as it often appears.”

We bring this up because Church strives for a similar level of gnarly but needed (some might even say brutal) honesty on his new solo album We Are Inextricable. Due out October 26th through felte, it starts with a stunner: the torrid chemtrails of “Chamomile,” which the singer/multi-instrumentalist describes in detail below…

This is sung by a narrator fantasizing, idly, one hopes, about her own suicide and it’s discovery by a lover. She pictures the scenes leading up to it in the first verse (razor straight/chilled vodka/klonopin/hot water), and, in images both cosmic and pathetic, what follows (piss yellow sun/blood red moon/two puddles on the tiles/of a white bathroom) in the second. The chorus is imagined as a kind of suicide note. It’s sung both sincerely and sarcastically—a platitude read off a tea bag: ‘life is for the living and you’re meant to be free’. She wants the one she leaves behind to be free, but for her, herbal tea and scented candles aren’t going to cut it.

Ironically however, I imagine her drinking tea and lighting candles as she imagines all this. Perhaps she’s morbidly hungover, and feeling doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over (this was my own condition when I wrote the lyrics) and the whole thing will blow over by evening. Then there’s the slightly distorted angelic choir that comes in hovering toward the end, and the insistent, repetitive church organ/synth arpeggio throughout, which almost feel protective, reassuring.