Sam Ray’s Ricky Eat Acid project has come a long way from the impressionistic ambience of 2014’s Three Love Songs and his early Bandcamp experiments. In the past few years, he’s used it as an outlet to play around with different modes of restraint, from propulsive one-offs like “Dear Lord” and “Triple Cup” to last year’s spacey mixtape, all the while putting in work on his two other projects, Teen Suicide and Julia Brown. Next month, Ray will release a new Ricky Eat Acid album called Talk To You Soon, and it sounds like the culmination of what he’s been working towards up until this point. As his REA tracks have grown more pointed and refined over the years, something has clicked into place, like running smudged glasses under water for the first time in a while.

“hey,” the opening track to his new album, demonstrates his progression as a producer and orchestrator. It retains the levelheadedness of his earlier material, but builds to a glittering, staticky blast without sacrificing any of the journey along the way. It features strings from Owen Pallett and has the faint hint of a banger playing out underneath, but Ray keeps everything firmly entrapped in some kind of fossilized amber. “I always wanted to open the record with the swelling chord at the beginning of the song,” Ray explained to The Fader, who debuted the track. “I’m glad I got to do that. It reminds me of being in the back of a very dark room that’s occasionally pulsing with light and just sort of taking it all in and resigning yourself to it. Like an absolutely emotionless sort of euphoria. That shit is cool to me. Like what doing molly feels like when your body’s stopped producing serotonin at all.”

Listen below.

Tracklist:
01 “hey”
02 “Nice To See You”
03 “This Is As Close To Heaven As I Get”
04 “Fucking To Songs On Radios”
05 “Never Alone In A Dark Room”
06 “Climbing Up The Big Red Tree”
07 “Pull”
08 “Know”
09 “On The Floor Beneath The Cross”
10 “Spinning Around Under The Bright Light In Bliss”
11 “Call My Name”
12 “: )”
13 “In The Grocery Store”
14 “As We Speak”
15 “On A Good Day”
16 “Ok”

Tour Dates:
10/23 Washington, DC @ Black Cat
10/27 Brooklyn, NY @ Baby’s All Right
10/30 Burlington, VT @ Higher Ground
10/31 Montreal, QC @ Bar Le Ritz
11/03 Chicago, IL @ Empty Bottle
11/04 Columbia, MO @ Cafe Berlin
11/05 Madison, WI @ Frequency
11/06 Des Moines, IA @ Vaudeville Mews
11/07 Lincoln, NE @ Vega
11/08 Denver, CO @ Lost Lake Lounge
11/11 Salt Lake City, UT @ Kilby Court
11/12 Boise, ID @ Reef
11/14 Seattle, WA @ The Sunset
11/16 Bend, OR @ Domino Room
11/17 San Francisco, CA @ Swedish American Music Hall
11/18 Los Angeles, CA @ Union

Talk To You Soon is out 10/28 via Terrible Records.

CREDIT: Alex Locater