Over the course of a decade, Nate Amos’ project This Is Lorelei has racked up 33 EPs and hundreds of songs, self-released and wonderfully chaotic. Today, the New York indie oddball — who also makes music in Water From Your Eyes — is announcing his attempt at a traditional album. It’s called Box For Buddy, Box For Star, and it’ll arrive on Double Double Whammy in June.

The lead single “Dancing In The Club” is out now, which Amos explains is “a riff on the ‘playing the heel’ romantic fuck-up archetype — it was supposed to be a character study and I guess it is but it turns out the character was just me.”

About Box For Buddy, Box For Star, he added:

I had just finished a tour with Water From Your Eyes, during which I laid on the ground at Stonehenge for 40 minutes and decided to stop smoking weed. Initially, this album was just a challenge to make music without getting high, and I was worried I wouldn’t come up with anything at all. I isolated myself from pretty much everyone and wrote songs all summer. I was pretty broke and significantly depressed, but also in a sort of healthy mental demolition mode, trying to reimagine how I wanted to move forward with my life. For better or worse, what I made ended up being a delayed recovery album, largely dealing with more significant addictions that I kicked a year earlier.

After Amos quit smoking weed, he created a routine that involved a lot of exercise, nicotine, ramen, and writing music. “Whenever I got fidgety because I couldn’t smoke weed, I would just do push-ups,” he said. “It got to a point where I was like, ‘I’m gonna light this cigarette, and I’m gonna do push-ups until I’ve smoked the entire cigarette, and then I’m gonna try to write another song.’”

Hear “Dancing In The Club” below.

TOUR DATES:
03/04 – Boston, MA @ The Rockwell *
03/05 – Winooski, VT @ Monkey House *
03/06 – Montreal, QC @ La Sala Rossa *
03/07 – Toronto, ON @ The Garrison *
03/08 – Cleveland, OH @ Happy Dog *
03/09 – Chicago, IL @ Schuba’s *
03/12-14 – Austin, TX @ SXSW
03/15 – New Orleans, LA @ Gasa Gasa *
03/16 – Tallahassee, FL @ Retrofit Records ^
03/18 – Durham, NC @ Rubies on Five Points ^
03/20 – Washington, DC @ Rhizome ^
03/21 – Philadelphia, PA @ MoMA 2 ^

* w/ Omni
^ w/ fantasy of a broken heart

Box For Buddy, Box For Star is out 6/14 on Double Double Whammy.