Following on from the success of their previous album, Patterns – which was met with acclaim – The Grasping Straws’ latest release, Shapes, marks a delightfully ambitious new step for the Brooklyn-based experimental psych-rock band.
Brooklyn rock group The Grasping Straws have dropped their latest album, Shapes.
Known for their “grungy jazz-infused abstractions,” The Grasping Straws make genre-defying music that merges rock, jazz, garage, and psychedelia.
The band’s previous album, Patterns, used thrashing rock music as a cathartic way of exploring harrowing themes like abuse and emotional entrapment. Following its release back in 2023, the band boasted a sizable and fervent fanbase.
The Grasping Straws’ latest album shifts perspective slightly, with a thematic move into the abstract and the universal. Broadly speaking, the album explores how meaning is crafted amid chaos, and how genuine human connection can still be possible even in the tech-obsessed brave new world we find ourselves in. Emotional nuance and spiritual reconnection are key themes within The Grasping Straws’ lyrics. On songs such as ‘Fingers’ and ‘Water It’, the band highlights humanity’s relationship with the world around it, in a way that feels genuinely moving and makes for joyous listening.
The songs on this album are replete with lyrical nods to coding and software languages. This was born from frontwoman Mallory Feuer’s work in the software engineering industry (an artist has gotta pay bills). These lyrical turns help the messages in the songs land in satisfying ways. On songs like ‘Robots’, The Grasping Straws offer a jaunty, but sharp-edged, cautionary tale about the seduction of technology.
And while the omnipresence of technology seems to cast a shadow over most of this album, the band attempts to work their way out of its influence with the music itself. In their own words: “Shapes are the ethereal building blocks of language, emotion, understanding, and communication. The album celebrates nature, oneness, and wildlife preservation, against a backdrop of technologically-driven consumerism. When we abstract away our arbitrarily assigned meanings, we can connect as pure lines, forms, colors, sounds, and overlapping shapes.”
While this all might sound lofty, Shapes is actually a very accessible and enjoyable psych-rock album, helmed by Feuer’s excellent voice and some deliciously grungy arrangements.
The creation of the album was the result of a creative collaboration between several renowned professionals in the music business. Shapes was recorded at Ground Control Studios, where recording engineer Murray Trider was able to capture the album’s loose, mind-expanding sound. The band was also able to work with Gordon Raphael (The Strokes and Regine Spektor), who produced the album, and Dom Richmond from Eiger Studios, who mastered it.
Having released Shapes on July 23, The Grasping Straws will promote the record with a two-week tour. They will perform in venues on the East and West Coasts of the US, as well as at venues in Canada.
For more information about The Grasping Straws’ latest album and tour plans, visit the band’s website.
