Yesterday, cult-followed Washington, DC emo-punks Origami Angel announced the follow-up to 2019’s Somewhere City, the aptly-titled double album GAMI GANG. Today they’ve released the high energy single “Neutrogena Spektor,” alongside an acoustic ballad, “Greenbelt Station.”

Off the bat, “Neutrogena Spektor” best showcases their witty, unfiltered angst: “That guy with the clear fuckin’ skin/ And the nice denim pants/ Man I wanna be him.” Vocalist/guitarist Ryland Heagy and drummer Pat Doherty are using their rowdy songs for positivity though, centering the song on friendship. “That guy with the best fuckin’ friends/ That’s me,” Heagy sings with an excited chant over celebratory riffs. Towards the end, the track dips into a hardcore-adjacent breakdown in which he yells about self-image: “It doesn’t matter to me!” — one of the more positive messages to arrive over metallic guitars. “Greenbelt Station,” on the other hand, is emotional and almost tear-jerking: “We both needed something/ the other can’t provide.”

Listen to the songs below.

Some words from Heagy:

We’ve been working on GAMI GANG for over two years at this point, and we’re beyond excited to finally be releasing new music. The songs on this record have parts written in totally different times of our lives, ranging from 2014 (before I even met Pat) to 2020, and all the time in between, so I consider this record a journey through the last 6 years of my life in a way. Whereas our last record, Somewhere City, was more of a bigger narrative concept, GAMI GANG contains handfuls of personal mementos and experiences, and flows between them chaotically at times.

This record is our biggest release to date in terms of length and track list, and we’re really happy to be building upon our existing discography in a massive way. We recorded GAMI GANG entirely in my bedroom over the pandemic, and had our wonderful engineer Jake Checkoway mix and master the tracks. It was a bit nerve racking to be recording an entire double LP worth of material on our own (Jake Checkoway recorded our Debut LP), but we ended up super happy with the results, and it added an element to this release we wouldn’t have been able to tap into otherwise. We self recorded most of our material before Somewhere City, so this return to self recording was a bit nostalgic in a way. We were super comfortable recording this album and I think it comes through in the way we sound, and how the songs flow within themselves and into the other tracks.

As soon as we wrote “Nuetrogena Spektor,” we knew it had to be a single off this record. This track dives into the ideas of self worth related to appearance, and it was pretty much a completely new thing for me writing wise. It goes hand and hand with some of the messages off of our previous LP, but gets into a much more personal perspective. The lyrics are about the elusiveness of clear skin to someone growing up with cystic acne, but the song has always felt fun and lighthearted to me because of the carefree chorus. And that is sort of what GAMI GANG is about to me at its core: Finding beauty in something you might have otherwise overlooked.

GAMI GANG is out 4/30 on Counter Intuitive Records. Pre-order it now.