The Providence-based musician Ted Bradley plays in former Cymbals Eat Guitars frontman Joseph D'Agostino's band Empty Country, and he also makes his own music as Strange Pains. D'Agostino produced, engineered, and mixed Strange Pains' upcoming LP The Diamond District, Volume 1, the first part of a planned two-LP set, which was originally supposed to come out today. It'll instead arrive next month, but the new single "Lucifer Disguised" is out today.
We've already posted Strange Pains' songs "Memory Man" and "Walking With Yves," and a few other Diamond District, Volume 1 songs are out there, too. But even with all that available information, "Lucifer Disguised," the new Strange Pains single, took me by surprise. It's a hard-charging alt-rock gem with huge hooks, and I can imagine it getting huge airplay in an imaginary past. In a press release, Bradley says:
I started writing it the morning after I moved to Providence, with my head rattling. I'd gone to see the There Were Wires reunion at AS220 the night before, and on the walk home I was thinking about identity and the way it accumulates and sheds. And how sometimes you don't relate to yourself. There's something funny and unsettling about that. It felt natural to explore the idea in the second person, and I left it that way in the end.
Check it out below.
The Diamond District, Volume 1 is out 10/16 on Best Brother Records.
