IDAHO - Lapse

“Kamikaze” is the opening song of Lapse, the first new album in more than thirteen years from groundbreaking slowcore pioneers IDAHO. Led by Laurel Canyon-based singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Jeff Martin since its formation in the early 90s, IDAHO has built a canon that defies the confines of indie rock, bearing the uncanny grace to stimulate equally the full spectrums of the heart and the mind, with lush, alien four-string guitar tones draped over a ragged, elegant desertscape of wry poetry and feedback.  “Kamikaze” finds IDAHO picking up where Martin left off, with focal bass and slide guitar hovering over hushed vocals fittingly “daydreaming about a reunion with old friends,” as he sings: “How can it be this long / since I’ve seen all of you.” Lapse arrives Friday, May 31, 2024, via Arts & Crafts.

Over the course of its four decade history, IDAHO has sustained a cult following devoted to the mysterious allure of the California band’s singular sound. To all those who have delighted in the IDAHO canon, there is the shared if not isolated notion of having found a rare diamond in the rough. As the band’s creative force Jeff Martin puts it perhaps too simply, “IDAHO will help you get through a challenging time in your life or bore and confuse the shit out of you.”

Emerging in the early 90s and often linked to the seminal downcast bands of the post-grunge-boom ‘slowcore’ “movement,” IDAHO is uniquely distinguished by the meticulous ease of Martin’s songcraft, marked by his cavernous 4-string electric guitar rippling out its melancholic tones and odd tunings. Less dirge than desert, alternatingly lush and laconic, gravelly and bucolic, Martin’s gentle, strained vocals lead the airy, earthen synergy of IDAHO’s cinematic music.

Lapse is the first new album from IDAHO since the cult indie rock band’s 2011 release, You Were A Dick. Its ten new songs are engraved with IDAHO’s long-standing signature sound: lavished by Martin, with bittersweet delivery on his heartfelt songs, cinematic music. Set against the oasis of 29 Palms, California, near Joshua Tree National Park, where it was recorded, Lapse is an album about relationships, and relationships based on music – a band – for lack of better word – still inspired by the notion of its very existence – “more of a feeling than a band” – and that its music connects deeply with a small but highly tapped-in and unflinchingly faithful audience. (Continue reading full bio on DISCO)