Photos: KNIFEPLAY to Release WHAT IS TRUTH? Album with Love Song Video

Philadelphia's Knifeplay have announced their third album, What Is Truth?, set for release January 22 via Double Double Whammy. Alongside the announcement, the band has shared a Ben Turok-directed video for the album's lead single, 'Love Song,' a 10-minute track.

'Love Song' is described as an honest but aspirational track, building from the axiom that we are all born from and into damage toward the idea that, if we can't necessarily mend each other, we can at least help one another muddle through. The electric guitars that roar beneath the acoustics somehow sound both like hope and also the absence of it, like potential deliverance or damnation.

Of the track's video, director Ben Turok says, 'This couple is a real 20-year-old couple I casted for the video and drove with from LA to New York. I had planned most of what we shot but of course some things just happened and that's most of what I liked in the end. I wanted to make something epic in scope, that had all this beauty and emotion baked into its images.'

Through the beautiful but wounded dozen tracks of What Is Truth?, Knifeplay largely transmutes the agony of our experience into sounds that are painterly like a sunset or graceful like a lullaby, as if the Philadelphia six-piece is trying to sweeten the bitterness of reality with the honey of pretty sound. With their backlit harmonies, languid rhythms, and guitar lines that open like invitations, these songs are an ark in a flood, a church amid a crisis, a long hug from an old friend at the precipice of a breakdown—any place you can seek succor while being real about how challenging our lives can get. What Is Truth?, then, is a sanctuary, built not only for being honest about what most people are up against as they simply survive but also for turning towards hope and love, wherever they may find it.

Track List

1. Toil

2. Little Candle

3. Agonizing Mountain

4. Flowers Must Die

5. Joy

6. Close Your Eyes

7. Toil (Reprise)

8. Lord, Where are You?

9. Stars

10. Love Song

11. Take the Light

12. Please Let the Children Be Artists

Tour Dates

10/10 - Harrisburg, PA - Capital City Music Hall *

12/11 - Philadelphia, PA - Mini Mart + *

w/ Rhododendron

+ w/ Hase & Full Body 2 (DJ Set)

More About Knifeplay & What Is Truth?

TJ Strohmer grew up far outside of a city, in a rural and culturally conservative part of southern Maryland. He was at odds with the area's values from an early age, making him feel like an outcast despite his parents' support of his musical interests, from taxiing him to guitar lessons with a local musician to hosting practices and the occasional show in their home. He found community and value in a scene that spanned the multi-state DMV and, at 18, moved to Philadelphia to invest himself in its teeming culture. To some extent, he brought his past with him, not only using Knifeplay's early music to process the losses and pains of where he'd come from but also sometimes doing so with sounds that reflected his rural past alongside his big-city present. He began to see the true spread of suffering, how people in the place he was from and the one to which he had come all struggled to exist. This understanding shaped Strohmer and, so, Knifeplay.

A dozen years have passed since that move; given the upheaval of the subsequent span, those feelings have only intensified. Strohmer wrote What Is Truth? across four years while navigating consistent depression, of seeing his surroundings through a filter of gray and considering how it is we all make it from one day to the next, through an entire life. Those questions are at the core of What Is Truth?. It is important to note here, though, that this is not a Philadelphia record; though it is Knifeplay's home, the litany of grievances here—the end of Eden and innocence, the sense of cosmic abandonment, the agony of loss—are not unique to the city, as resonant wherever Knifeplay's tour van happened to stop during those last four years as wherever Knifeplay happens to reside.

When Knifeplay began, Strohmer wrote and recorded many of the parts himself, but Knifeplay is now a real, working band—bassist Alex Stackhouse, keyboardist Max Black, drummers Joey Ginaldi and Nora Maupin, guitarist John Klein, and singer and guitarist Johanna Baumann, who recorded all of this album in three Philadelphia studios, including her own, and whose voice forms a perfect timbral tandem with Strohmer. (Guitarist Dennis Martinelli has since stepped in for Klein as a guitarist, while Ginaldi has left Knifeplay.)

The collaborative process behind What Is Truth? gave Strohmer a sense of shared trust and purpose. For the first time, he could drill down on writing and singing exactly what he meant, knowing that the band would help him translate his feelings and ideas into vivid sound. What Is Truth? follows the same general arc, gradually moving from the deepest dark toward beckoning light.

What Is Truth? is almost exactly 80 minutes long, meaning it's the kind of record you would have stuffed onto a CD-R back in the days when Low were still on Kranky, when Red House Painters were still working, when Ida were making a major label pay for their masterpiece. Strohmer laughs as he admits that he knows this isn't a record for modern attention spans—a slow but stunning hour-plus, stretched across 12 patient pieces. He's OK with that: These songs are where he reckons with the world, where he considers what it means for anyone to endure as a human. As Strohmer sings in a perfect line that reads like a mission statement, 'This is what we admit in the confusion of being honest.'

This work takes time. In his heaviest days, Strohmer found consolation in writers and singers who had been there, too, pushing through despair and possibly even toward something better. What Is Truth? mirrors those predecessors and so feels like an offering, a beacon flashing through the dark, an invitation to keep moving forward.

Photo Credit: Marcus Maddox | Download Hi-Res