Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier has announced his debut solo album, We Sang, Therefore We Were, which will be released at the end of April. “Satomi, Ed, John and I were chatting between shows in Austin in early December,” Saunier shared on his decision to release something separately from his long-running band. “They encouraged me to make a record on my own. With no one to please but myself, it came together way faster than usual. It was basically done by the holidays.”

“I had been excited by the announcement that the new Rolling Stones record was going to sound ‘angry.’ I thought, ‘Yes, I’m angry too,'” Saunier continued. “But Hackney Diamonds turned out more like cotton candy than punk rock. So I went back to Nirvana. I always loved the catchy melody over massive distortion, the way their songs refused to conform to simple major or minor scales, the dark sarcasm which still resonates in this age of phony blue-check-washing of fascism.”

Today, he’s sharing the album’s lead single “Grow Like A Plant.” Here’s what Saunier had to say about it:

This song addresses that annoying quirk of the homosapien mind where it thinks it’s made of higher quality molecules than the rest of the universe. For millennia civilizations managed to temper this suicidal arrogance with ritual. Until 500 years ago, when a handful of self-appointed experts invented The Enlightenment, proposing that men can solve any problem given enough brooding and/or physical violence; that the cosmos is actually nothing but an inert blob of matter for us to buy and sell. What if this is all wrong? What if it’s humans who are really the mindless instinct-machines, competing for territory, food, and mates, and it’s the plant and animal kingdoms that secretly know how to think and have fun?

Watch a video for it below.

TRACKLIST:
01 “There Were Rebels”
02 “Front-load the Fun”
03 “Yeah You, Person”
04 “Don’t Design Yourself This Way”
05 “Furrowed Sugarloaf”
06 “Rip the Atmosphere from the Wind”
07 “Grow Like a Plant”
08 “No One Displayed the Vigor Necessary to Avert Disaster’s Approach”
09 “Blame Yourself”
10 “Instead of Queen”
11 “Not for Mating, Not for Pleasure, Not for Territory”
12 “Playing Tunes of Victory on the Instruments of Our Defeat”

We Sang, Therefore We Were is out 4/26 via Joyful Noise Records.