Mamalarky detail forthcoming album, Hex Key

“Through a lot of games of UNO I’ve discovered I’m actually a pretty competitive person. And somehow, the feeling of losing has become highly motivating to me. I always feel like I’m competing against myself, trying to best my last attempt at whatever I’ve set out to do. Like, you probably can’t be the best of all time, but you’ll always be the best you of all time–no one can dispute that,” Livvy Bennett explains.

“I wanted to write something that felt powerful but funny, too, like laughing in the face of doubt. Cause betting on yourself even when you feel like a losing horse pays off in big ways! If you can make yourself feel like you’re winning right at the moment of failure and only measure yourself against your own barometers, you’re gonna be a lot happier.”

On the forthcoming album, the band recorded takes in between the sounds of passing ice cream trucks and yowling stray cats in their Los Angeles home studio, a tight but prolific living room. While writing the album, Bennett had just quit her job, moved to Los Angeles from Atlanta, and was delivering pizza via Uber Eats.

Around this time, Bennett and keyboardist Michael Hunter also started producing for other artists out of their home studio. The experience led to further genre-bending in their own work and pushed them to make more music than they ever had before. “I was writing some of my favorite music ever, but it didn’t feel how I expected it to,” she says. “I still didn’t have it all figured out. So I wrote songs like ‘Feels So Wrong,’ and ‘#1 Best of All Time’ as a way of telling myself what I needed to hear.”

Tracklist:

1. Broken Bones
2. Won’t Give Up
3. The Quiet
4. Hex Key
5. Anhedonia
6. #1 Best of All Time
7. Take Me
8. MF
9. Blow UP
10. Blush
11. Nothing Lasts Forever
12. Feels So Wrong
13. Here’s Everything