Across three pre-release singles, Kevin Barnes guides of Montreal through starkly contrasted sonic landscapes, linked dreamily by something like a cosmic fishing line, as their new album Lady On The Cusp morphs and molds into a purposefully kaleidoscopic fantasy. This final transmission from Athens, GA is a rapturous synthesis that combines a keen reckoning with the past with hopeful glimpses of the future as Kevin and their partner, Christina Schneider (Locate S,1), leave the ever-suffocating conservatism of the American south to live amongst the snowy peaks and progressive politics of southern Vermont. 

Listen/Buy the Lady On The Cusp today and snag your tickets to their upcoming tour across the US.

“2 Depressed 2 Fuck” was the first song to emerge for Lady On The Cusp, the despair of its title and hook speaking as much to modern intergenerational malaise as any specific encounter. It begins with busted drums and electronic gashes, but Kevin slowly twists those caustic noises into a buoyant gem where the refrain lingers like a warm spring dream. Likewise, “PI$$ PI$$” uses the flotsam of past trauma as a springboard into a thundering dance jam about leaving that shit behind, about discarding “the Amygdala hijack furies” that plant us in emotional concrete. Kevin dreams of the personal frontier of Vermont in the Byrds-like beauty “Rude Girl On Rotation,” referencing not only the lush forests of the Green Mountain State but also a new neighbor who loves just intonation and the possibilities it presents. And the brilliant “Soporific Cell” is an unbridled and infectious love song, Kevin's lissome falsetto offering up every bit of themselves to Christina and their life together. “I’m prepared to make an everyday beast of myself,” Barnes vows over sashaying guitars and splashing cymbals, “only for you.”

Having always been fond of linguistic tricks, of Montreal’s catalog is loaded with alliteration, puns, and florid phrases that dare you to tease out a meaning for yourself. But the two-part finale of Lady On The Cusp levels up in that regard, as Kevin slides into the amniotic haze of dream language. They compiled “Poetry Surf” by cutting together words and ideas found in books by Ezra Pound and James Joyce or life at large, so that “chryselephantine chiaroscuro cerements [are] unearthed.” The track is a devilish whirlwind, Kevin delighting in these games over a martial beat and vertiginous keys. As the song slams into “Genius in the Wind,” the bass strutting in endless circles now, Kevin sings that “Unwittingly temporalist scorched earth is radio violence,” seeming to set up another delirious round of wordplay. But listen closely, and notice that it is instead a pledge of allegiance—to follow someone into the darkness of their life and hopefully come out better on the other side, with some sex and music and fun along the way. All of this perfectly coils together for the infectious “Yung Hearts Bleed Free,” a Bootsy Collins-influenced, self-deprecating ode to Barnes’ heroes—“sex maniacs” and “drug-addled creeps,” all—that indulges in freedom and fetish. It is candid, too, about the doubts and shortcomings of any life lived fully.

Encouraged to engage with the wreckage of their past, to grow beyond it in a way they admit they never had, Lady On The Cusp finds of Montreal continuing to press for novel ways to make the simultaneously jubilant and tumultuous tunes they have always loved.