Palm Ghosts - Lifeboat Candidate

Palm Ghosts Embrace Pop and Dystopia on Lifeboat Candidate – Nashville Scene

If ever there was a need for some good dystopian pop, 2021 is the year. And thankfully Palm Ghosts heard the call. – Associated Press

The sound of an 80s prom in a war zone…located in the dead heart of country music, Nashville, TN.

That is the sound and spirit of Palm Ghosts, as far from the honky-tonks and pedal taverns of their adopted city as one can get. More at home in rainy Manchester or blustery Berlin, the quartet weaves early cinematic dream pop and new wave with brooding post punk.

Palm Ghosts has a long history, as Joe has carried the name since his Philly days when the project had an indie folk sound.  But, it is the current iteration of the band that sounds more like a clap back to the sound for which Nashville is notorious.  Embracing their 80’s idols, like New Order, The Cure, David Bowie, John Carpenter and even Divine, these Nashville transplants released 2018’s Architecture.  With a steady stream of singles and EPs, the band has continued to write music that sums up the lot of their 80’s youth, but their most cohesive effort is now.

Like most bands in 2020 trying to stay sane, the band had to email ideas and tracks back & forth.  Somehow that isolation fueled a new immediacy and energy in their songs that only a year of pandemic, protest and political turmoil could elicit.  The fruits of that labor, Lifeboat Candidate, is a dark and dystopian effort, filled with confusion and dread, albeit with a bit of humor and hope.  The album is a relentless statement, not giving a pause between tracks to breathe like the micro machines spokesman, yet as suave as Dean Stockwell in Blue Velvet.

In 2021, we hope to scream and sing and dance in public again, but we will definitely be releasing a lot more music.  We are relentless, with a lot left to say, but perhaps these people say it better:

Manchester’s Analogue Trash describes Palm Ghosts as “Achingly beautiful, fragile and majestic music. An intoxicating mix of Shoegaze and Dream pop, taking from the 80’s but not in debt to it”

South Africa’s Jangle Pop Hub has said the band has “An inimitable 80’s style dream pop that mixes the avaricious swirl of The Cocteau Twins, the atmospherics of The Cure and the grandiosity of Echo and The Bunnymen”

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