{"title":"Pickle Darling","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"laundromat-2","title":"Laundromat","description":"\u003cp\u003eAs Pickle Darling, Christchurch, New Zealand-based producer and multi-instrumentalist Lukas Mayo (they\/them) zooms in on the universality of existential thought with earnest playfulness. After years of touring on previous albums, Bigness (2019, Z Tapes) and Cosmonaut (2021, Z Tapes) and supporting artists like Lucy Dacus and The Beths, Pickle Darling's third album, \u003ci\u003eLaundromat\u003c\/i\u003e, marks their debut with Father\/Daughter Records. \u003ci\u003eLaundromat\u003c\/i\u003e !nds magic in the mundane, pointing past perfectionism and instead leans into the art of the everyday. Art is everywhere: in the shape we make out of a napkin while waiting for our co\"ee to arrive, in the text we send to a friend in need, in the beat we make on the steering wheel while stuck at a red light. \u003ci\u003eLaundromat\u003c\/i\u003e was created in what Mayo describes as their first stable living situation, away from difficult flatmates, tense surroundings, and abysmal landlords. As an artist who writes, records, and produces all of their music at home, the security of their current place allowed their ideas to blossom. Writing soon became a daily practice, and rather than laboring over each song like they had previously some songs on previous records were months and months in the making Mayo found themselves drawn to the spark of what had created the initial idea in the !rst place. Mayo highlights folk artists Connie Converse, Bill Fay, and Vashti Bunyan as passengers in the process of \u003ci\u003eLaundromat\u003c\/i\u003e; artists who put music into the world then disappeared from the public eye. “I wanted to capture the feeling of making music that's out of step with everything around it,” they explain. “I wanted it to be a lot more immediate.” Mayo recorded a lot of \u003ci\u003eLaundromat’s\u003c\/i\u003e ideas onto their phone, giving themselves permission to allow those ideas to be the entire song. The enforced length of what a song should be a neat, 3-minute sellable product has always bothered Mayo, and while some of the songs on \u003ci\u003eLaundromat\u003c\/i\u003e do !t around that particular mold, Pickle Darling says the smaller pockets on the album were them striving to create their “own kind of normal.” “A just reward for a musician who’s been on the cusp of a big breakthrough for several years now.” Rolling Stone\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Father \/ Daughter Records","offers":[{"title":"Tape","offer_id":50486519857483,"sku":"2024529","price":13.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"LP","offer_id":50486519595339,"sku":"2024524","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":50486521037131,"sku":"2024530","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/Pickle_Darling__Laundromat_6de69fd0_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727610705"},{"product_id":"battlebots","title":"Bots","description":"\u003cp\u003ePickle Darling has always existed just outside of the periphery. In a heightened time of fast music, algorithmic consumption and rapid virality, Lukas Mayo (they\/them) has remained focused on the album. Their discography is a reflection of their creative evolution, and they deliberately look for ways to push sonic boundaries from release to release. Since debuting with Bigness in 2019 followed by Cosmonaut in 2021, Mayo has curated a catalog that is deeply personal and strangely tactile, where tiny, unexpected details—an off-kilter loop, a whispered aside, the warmth of an old Casio—become as crucial as melody itself. Their 2023 LP Laundromat was a precise and polished expansion of that world, a record that felt like it had been carefully placed behind glass.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTheir fourth album, \u003cem\u003eBots\u003c\/em\u003e, by contrast, is unruly and full of static: a collection of songs that feel like they could only ever exist on scratched CD-Rs passed between friends. Self-recorded in their home studio in Christchurch, New Zealand, it finds Mayo taking a scalpel to their own songwriting. Songs were stretched, chopped, reversed. Some ideas started as “unlistenable garbage” before morphing into something unexpectedly beautiful. If a song felt too straightforward, Mayo had to mess it up. That friction of old and new, organic and digital, melody and noise is what drives \u003cem\u003eBots.\u003c\/em\u003e Drawing inspiration from a strange, scattered lineage: Four Tet’s \u003cem\u003eRounds,\u003c\/em\u003e The Books, Neneh Cherry’s \u003cem\u003eBroken Politics\u003c\/em\u003e, The Wrens’ \u003cem\u003eThree Types of Reading Ambiguity\u003c\/em\u003e, but also the emotional directness of 2000s pop like Madonna’s \u003cem\u003eRay of Light \u003c\/em\u003eand Robyn’s \u003cem\u003eBody Talk\u003c\/em\u003e, the result is an album that feels like a glitch in the system, pushing against past constraints while embracing the weird, beautiful mess of making something new.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Father \/ Daughter Records","offers":[{"title":"LP - Shockwave Swirl","offer_id":53003038884171,"sku":"R0467-7480","price":24.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":53003038916939,"sku":"R0467-5637","price":11.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/PickleDarling-Bots.png?v=1755006578"}],"url":"https:\/\/shop.roughtrade.com\/collections\/pickle-darling.oembed","provider":"Rough Trade","version":"1.0","type":"link"}