11 May 2021 - 0 Comments

Wellington/Pōneke-based post-post-punk band Oh Sweet Nothings are stoked to announce their debut full-length album, The Math, available on all digital streaming and download platforms on 4 June 2021. The self-produced album is a culmination of eight years’ worth of song-writing, and personal and artistic development, all lovingly crammed into twelve tracks. The Math is set to be the defining project for OSN, and is intended as a soundtrack to the throes of self-doubt, and finding a way through it.

Intricately detailed yet rough-around-the-edges, The Math revives then disassembles the classic sounds of garage rock, post-punk, grunge, indie-rock and shoegaze – each track playfully subverting the last. Melancholic washed-out guitar and synth textures gently carry and uplift the listener, before dropping them into a rough, tongue-in-cheek mess of crunchy guitar riffs and ruckus, erratic grooves. For Oh Sweet Nothings, epic purpose and grandeur go hand-in-hand with the absurd, cheeky and vulgar.

OSN have made a name for themselves in the local underground scene with their self-aware brand and energetic live performances. Their live act showcases their off-kilter approach to song-writing – swinging between the profound and the profane, both sonically and lyrically. The group have saved the best songs of their live set for this record, intentionally leaving them unreleased until this point. Band leader, Aeron Glasgow Keene, comments: “I’ve always loved the album format, even if it might be going out of fashion, and I consider these songs to work best in context, in a certain order, like scenes in a movie”.

Most of the songs on The Math are several years old: “these songs have grown up with us,” says lead guitarist, Clarrie Macklin. “Some come from jams we had right after we graduated high school, a few have only just been finished. In a way, our album grew up with us and carries a lot of the hopes, confusion, and turmoil that a millennial-zoomer entering the 2010's and 20's can have.”

“Around half of the lyrics on The Math are unchanged from when we first wrote them as we were starting out,” says Keene, “and they had all this unprocessed post-adolescence angst that we needed to put somewhere. The other half were written along the way since, and came more from a place of struggling to remember why it was so important to become quote-unquote rock stars… We had a profoundly difficult time keeping the band and the dream alive once we all hit uni, for a myriad of reasons. But these songs stuck with me. I knew they wanted to exist, and they would haunt me forever if I didn’t make it happen…so there are certain tracks on the album which reflect on that journey.”

The album assembles numerous recording sessions from different studios and home setups around Wellington, including Massey University’s studios, and flats in Brooklyn, Newtown, Oriental Bay, and Karori. The editing and mixing process was extensive, and was carried out by Keene over the course of 2020.

Following the release of the single and music video for Shinbone in April, three additional singles are set for release prior to the album, the third of which will be accompanied by a visualiser video in collaboration with Knifedge Visuals.

Oh Sweet Nothings Upcoming Shows

15 May @ Local Scene Showcase, Paraparaumu
6 June @ Valhalla, Wellington w/ LOTU, Floral Shirt and Skitz Hydro
17 June - Cold Hands Music Video Release Party @ Moon, Wellington w/ Ingrid & The Ministers and Friendlies

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