Sheer Mag announce their third studio album, Playing Favorites

"Playing Favorites", the album opener announces itself with a sense of self-assured swagger, spinning a tale of life on the road. “After nearly ten years of touring together, we felt qualified to write a song about doing it. It's a good introduction to the next era of Sheer Mag,” the band tell. The track comes alongside a video directed and photographed by Craig Scheihing which gives fans a glimpse into life on the road.

Sheer Mag began to work in earnest on their follow up to 2019’s A Distant Call in the summer of 2021, which they originally imagined would take the shape of a tautly constructed four-song disco EP. As Matt Palmer, the band’s rhythm guitarist and primary lyricist, recollects: “those first four songs came out of a hard moment in life for all of us collectively—they kind of felt like an attempt to figure out how to have fun when you actually feel miserable.”

Over a six-month stretch spanning the fall of 2022 to the winter of 2023, Kyle Seely and his brother Hart Seely (bass) set about tracking the instrumentals for the record, resetting their studio configuration each week in order to impose a more tailored, multi-session atmosphere upon the record’s acoustic landscape. Palmer rejoined vocalist Tina Halladay in Philadelphia the following spring to write and record the vocals for Playing Favorites, which depart rather markedly from the band’s prior material, placing an added emphasis on pronouncedly existential, interpersonal storytelling and ornate background harmonies.

Reflecting upon the shift between this newest LP and the band’s previous material, Halladay notes: “those first few records felt like a personal coming out party; they felt like they were an introduction to me and my life story. With these new songs, I feel like I’m finally able to move past that—there are parts on this record that I couldn’t imagine being able to sing ten, five, or even three years ago.

Tracklist:

1. Playing Favorites
2. Eat It and Beat It
3. All Lined Up
4. Don’t Come Lookin’
5. I Gotta Go
6. Moonstruck
7. Mechanical Garden
8. Golden Hour
9. Tea On The Kettle
10. Paper Time
11. When You Get Back