Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band— the project of Louisville-based visual artist, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Ryan Davis — announce their new album, New Threats From The Soul, out July 25th via Sophomore Lounge/Tough Love. The lead single and title track, which features guest vocalist Catherine Irwin of legendary Louisville band Freakwater, is streaming now.
2023’s Dancing On The Edge was quickly beloved by those who stumbled upon it, earning high praise from publications like Pitchfork & The Line Of Best Fit, who deemed it a “remarkable, endlessly rewarding debut.” His sophomore album, New Threats From The Soul, reckons mightily with the perplexities of human efficacy and agency in an absurd and debased world. This probably sounds hopelessly plodding and severe. It is not—not remotely. It’s a shit-ton of fun. The songs are all earwigs; the arrangements genuinely thrilling, enlivening efforts by the crackerjacks that comprise the sprawling Roadhouse Band. Each trip through the record reveals more of the depth and breadth and tangle of its tapestry.
Across New Threats…, Ryan manages near-rhymes that a hundred years’ worth of monkeys laboring at Chat GPT-enabled typewriters couldn’t achieve: “bromeliad” and “necrophiliac”; “urinal” and “de Chirico.” Kinky Friedman lamented that people thought his funny songs were sad and his sad songs were funny, when they were both simultaneously. Like the Kinkster, Ryan can make you laugh through a lump in your throat. In his formidable crew of harmony singers there are three of the most gifted lyricists to currently walk among us—Catherine Irwin, Will Oldham, Myriam Gendron, Lou Turner— which testifies to the profound heft of his writing (these folks don’t often sign up to sing pap).
New Threats From the Soul is a masterclass in reducing the sublime to the prosaic, immensity to infinitesimality, and vice versa (the trick can only work both ways). Everything in our universe is essentially flotsam or jetsam, rubbish heaps of fragments and shards. We, especially, are jerry-rigs of bubblegum and driftwood, inconsistencies and incoherencies, dead dreams and necrophagous hopes, “mismeasurements between the place where [we are] and the place where [we] could have been,” although somehow not—miracle of miracles—bereft of simple joys, as Davis sings on today’s single.
The record functions in parallel with Kafka’s winking dictum that there is an infinite amount of hope in the universe, just not for us. New Threats… suggests that maybe, just maybe, something like redemption is possible, but only once we’re entirely emptied out and hawked in toto down at Walden Pawn.
New Threats From the Soul is released on dbl LP, CD and all digital formats via Tough Love (UK&EU)/Sophomore Lounge (R.O.W) on 25th July. There are two vinyl formats – one on black, and a second on white, each in an edition of 250. Pre-order here
Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band U.K. / EU tour Dates:
Wed. May 7 – Ipswich, UK @ St. Stephen’s Church
Thu. May 8 – Luton, UK @ The Bear Club
Fri. May 9 – London, UK – Tough Love 20 @ ICA – tickets
Sat. May 10 – Bristol, UK @ Exchange
Wed. Aug. 20 – Amsterdam, NL @ Tolhuistuin %
Thu. Aug. 21 – Amsterdam, NL @ Tolhuistuin %
Wed. Aug. 27 – Larmer Tree Gardens, Dorset,, UK @ End of the Road Festival
Wed. Aug. 27 – Birmingham,, UK @ Moseley Folk & Arts Festival
* = w/ Ulrika Spacek & William Doyle
% = w/ MJ Lenderman & The Wind
