Hear Lung unleash a cello-driven noise rock beast with “The Mattress (canvas)”

Lung, the Cincinnati-based duo of cellist/vocalist Kate Wakefield and drummer Daisy Caplan (formery of Foxy Shazam), release their fifth album The Swankeeper via Feel It Records on May 30. Today the duo have released the first single from the album, “The Mattress (canvas)”, and it’s one of the most abrasive songs you’ll ever hear that features a cello as its lead instrument. It’s an abrasive, minimalist but catchy take on noise rock that’s piercing and heavy as hell, pairing the bluesy, gothic sensibility of PJ Harvey in the mid-’90s with an even pricklier and doomier sensibility. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that they’ve shared the stage with The Jesus Lizard, because this thing roars with muscle and menace.

Wakefield said about the new single in a statement, “The song deals with the darker sides of our psyche that relish in burning our lives down. The secret parts of us that love to fall apart. And the conflicting emotions and worlds we go to as a result.”

Caplan adds, “’The Mattress’ began on a long drive after a nightmare and was refined over email while I was stuck in a hotel hallucinating with a 103 degree Covid fever. For me, the raw atmosphere, dreamlike structure, and upside-down rhythms still reflect the transitory weirdness and uncertainty from which it originated. Like an anxiety dream you can only remember strange fragments of that are somehow comforting in retrospect.”

Lung The Swankeeper tracklist:

1. Everlasting Nothingness
2. The Money
3. The Mattress
4. Clown Car
5. Firespell
6. Lucky You
7. Paved With Gold
8. Sunshine’s Over
9. Self Help Journey
10. The Witch
11. The Swimmer
12. The Magician
13. The Snake