High Pulp - Days In The Desert

Los Angeles-based experimental jazz collective High Pulp will release their new album ‘Days in the Desert’ in this year’s peak sweltering summer heat on July 28. Rooted in the jazz tradition while also smitten by indie-rock and electronic music, High Pulp is willing to grab from all these sounds at once to pursue something truly their own. ‘Days in the Desert’ reveals the band realizing their strengths, deepening their own bonds, and pushing all these skills into a thrilling new sonic vista all but unimaginable just a few years before.

“(If You Don’t Leave) The City Will Kill You,” the album’s first single featuring Daedelus, reveals the band’s latest sensibilities. There’s a tingling electronic foundation and nighttime driving backbeat, the horn charts bursting through like passing headlights. It’s anthemic and aerodynamic, and right at the break, Daedelus drops in to take it even further out into the cosmos.

“The word jazz is going to follow our band around forever, which is fine, we love jazz, we are inspired by jazz,” group founder and drummer Bobby Granfelt explains. “But our influences are much wider than that.” In embracing the likes of Gil Evans-Miles Davis jazz collaborations in the 1950s as well as ‘90s lo-fi indie-rock like ‘Dots and Loops’ by Stereolab and ‘TNT’ by Tortoise, High Pulp has found a middle ground. As the vision for this album became clearer, the message was evident. “We embraced more imperfections in terms of our executions, but as a result our compositions got stronger, more solid,” alto saxophonist Andy Morrill says. “The album started to get simpler. And also a little more human.”

Granfelt returns to that titular image: “Emotionally it’s real. You’re in the desert, there’s mirages. And all you have is your own conviction and sense of direction to go.” With ‘Days in the Desert,’ High Pulp wandered the desert to craft an album that sounds close to home.