"Full moon last night / Woke up got high"
The hazy trip seductive stoner anthem, Stuck, by experimental pop duo Black Grapefruit is informed by the world that seems to have stopped revolving on it's axis. Populations stuck at home, unable to work, some people we are in end days and some in end daze. Stuck was recorded the week that Congress announced that stimulus checks were coming. It is about getting high to lift yourself up, at least out of the morass of negativity, a way to find the solace in the chaos.
The line: “Full moon last night / Woke up got high / News say we all dyin’ / Guess I better get high again” is at once doused with a heavy wet blanket of reticence, something we all feel, push through and shake off eventually. Humans are sharks after all, if we don't move we die. Black Grapefruit wanted this song to "feel like an afternoon malaise; one of those days when you’re checked out by lunch and have nowhere to go, so you let your mind wander into space as if it’s under some kind of spell" and they do succeed with a heavy, heavy bounce, divergent synth flourishes and sultry, hazy vox.
-Robb Donker Curtius
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In 2018, Black Grapefruit released All My Relations, a sharp, immediate, and unclassifiable exploration of identity and loss — by turns kinetic and ruminative, which Noisey dubbed “...one of the year’s most confounding and unpredictable pop records.” It was their first album since moving from Portland, OR, to New York City, and then on to Deposit, NY (pop. 1,712). After enjoying positive notices for that record from the likes of the New York Times and The FADER, the duo of Randa Smith and Brian Dekker are back this summer with Fade/Forget, a new project that balances exquisite pop songcraft with innovative soundscapes and moments of avant-garde experimentalism. If All My Relations was about the journey to self-discovery through radical change and acceptance, Fade/Forget explores what comes after that transformation — in the space we create, the home we choose for ourselves.
With two guest vocal spots, and additional production from the reclusive artist Ambient Jones, Fade/Forget represents an expansion for Black Grapefruit. Still happily ensconced in the secluded rural enclave they’ve called home for the past three-plus years, Smith and Dekker have continued their relentless pursuit of musical innovation from a place of newfound stability, producing dozens of demos, painstakingly honing the most promising ones into electrically catchy, infectious songs, and inviting in fresh ears to collaborate with and challenge them.
The emotional landscape of Fade/Forget, though, is pure Black Grapefruit, dominated by a lyrical focus on romantic relationships and the complexities of nostalgia — the collateral damage of love, and what we are left with when we are left with ourselves. Do we trust in weed or in crystals, or can we dance the past away? And what about when we find ourselves still in love — can we admit to the fear that’s at the heart of the record’s heartache, and ask our partner to hold us close? The outro of the album’s uncharacteristically un-syncopated penultimate track “0122” says yes, in a moment of naked vulnerability, buoyed by a squall of power chords and feedback. The message, then, is the same one Polonius offered Laertes: to thine own self be true. Of course, you have to know yourself to follow that advice, and after witnessing Black Grapefruit’s journey to that knowledge in All My Relations, it’s a privilege to hear their taste and technique operating at such an elite level with Fade/Forget.
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