I can never, ever remember whether Peter Katz's New York indie rock project is called Peaer or Paear, but the upcoming album Doppelgänger is good enough that I'm now mostly certain that it's Peaer. Look at that! I don't have to copy-paste or anything. My brain no longer becomes pure slush when I look at that sequence of vowels. I'm like 90% sure that I'm doing it right in this post, and I'm so confident that I'm not even going to proofread. We're walking the tightrope with no net here. We're living dangerously.
Doppelgänger, the first new Peaer album in seven years, comes out on Friday. We posted heard the advance tracks "Just Because," "Button," and "Bad News." Today, we get the new song "End Of The World," a playful little slackjawed amble with a bit of oldies-radio grace to it. As it turns out, the lyrics are all about a disturbing experience. Here's what Katz says about it:
"End Of The World" was inspired by a time that i thought I got hacked and had my identity stolen. i feel as if i am relatively internet and tech-savvy, but this was a pretty convincing email! they said that they had all my data and information and were going to delete it all if I didn’t pay them some amount of bitcoin. I’d heard of that happening to people (I think on a podcast?), so it did have me kind of spiral. I didn’t end up doing anything about it, and it went away. It's not like i have many valuable assets that anyone would really want to steal in the first place. Regardless, the feeling of paranoia in the modern age definitely influenced my lyrics on this one. It started with the first few lines which I thought are pretty illustrative of an over-thinker ("The distance between each step/ The duration of each breath"). Musically, the song ended up being a more traditional pop-structure, but we had a lot of fun tinkering with the transitions, dynamics, and chord melodies to make it a bit more rewarding to play and listen to. Sonically, it still feels very bright, while the subject matter remains in a paranoid, unsettled place.
Paear's new album Doppelgänger is out 1/16 on Danger Collective. Wait. Shit.
