Algiers – “I Can’t Stand It” (Feat. Future Islands’ Samuel T. Herring & Boy Harsher’s Jae Matthew)
Next month, Atlanta band Algiers will be back with a guest-packed new album called SHOOK. They’ve already shared “Bite Back” featuring billy woods and Backxwash and “Irreversible Damage” featuring Rage Against The Machine’s Zack de la Rocha. Today, Algiers are back with “I Can’t Stand It!” featuring Samuel T. Herring from Future Islands and Jae Matthews from Boy Harsher.
Sampling fellow Atlanta artist Lee Moses’ 1971 song “What You Don’t Want Me To Be,” “I Can’t Stand It!” was written and produced by Algiers frontman Franklin James Fisher, who calls the song “a very personal song about a devastating loss of someone I believed to be the love of my life which nearly ended in my suicide.”
Fisher continues: “I think the song’s narrative arc reflects the sense of dread and the path that led me to that moment. She put on ‘What You Don’t Want Me To Be’ the first time I heard it and I knew immediately that I was going to sample it — I just couldn’t have known the result would be a song about our own end. But every time I sing that song now it feels like I heal a little bit more.”
Matthews adds: “I wanted to give Algiers not so much a narrative, but a recollection of a feeling. That abstract evocation that comes when you think about someone who broke yr heart and how that pain still tethers you.”
Listen to “I Can’t Stand It!” below.
SHOOK is out 2/24 via Matador Records.